3m Innovative Properties Company

Solventum Intellectual Properties Company

3m Innovation Properties Company

Alberto Alvarez

Guruprasad Somasundaram

Richard E Raby

Brian J Stankiewicz

Alexandra R Cunliffe

Benjamin D Zimmer

Nitsan Ben-Gal Nguyen

Eric S Hansen

Steven C Demlow

The invention relates to a method for determining whether a tooth is correctly shaped and oriented to avoid interference with another tooth using virtual articulation. The method comprises a) receiving data indicative of a virtual dentition of an oral cavity of a patient by a computing device, the data indicative of the virtual dentition including data indicative of at least one of a virtual mandibular arch representing a mandibular arch of the patient or a virtual maxillary arch representing a maxillary arch of the patient; b) receiving data indicating a selected point on the virtual dentition of the oral cavity; and c) determining a tangent vector indicating a direction of motion of the selected point and determining whether the orientation of a tooth of the virtual dentition or the shape of the tooth is correctly shaped and oriented based on the determined tangent vector, wherein the tangent vector is based on a rotational axis of the virtual mandibular arch.

Virtual articulation model for dental treatment

A method of analyzing a positional relationship between a dental restoration and a dental substructure. The method has steps of scanning a reference area and determining the shape of the dental substructure in its positional relationship to the reference area, and thereby providing a virtual dental substructure model and scanning the reference area along with scanning at least a portion of the dental restoration in fit position with the dental substructure to provide a virtual assembly model. The method further has the step of providing fitting quality information between the dental restoration model and the dental substructure model. The method utilizes superposing of further virtual models to provide the fitting quality information. The method facilitates the assessment of the quality of the fit between a dental restoration and a dental substructure.

Method for analyzing a positional relationship between a dental restoration and a dental substructure

A method for determining virtual articulation from dental scans. The method includes receiving digital 3D models of a person's maxillary and mandibular arches, and digital 3D models of a plurality of different bite poses of the arches. The digital 3D models of the maxillary and mandibular arches are registered with the bite poses to generate transforms defining spatial relationships between the arches for the bite poses. Based upon the digital 3D models and transforms, the method computes a pure rotation axis representation for each bite pose of the mandibular arch with respect to the maxillary arch. The virtual articulation can be used in making restorations or for diagnostic purposes.

Virtual model of articulation from intra-oral scans

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Madrid, Spain

Alberto Alvarez