Nobel Biocare Services, Ag

Medicim Nv

Veerle Wouters

Wouter Mollemans

Filip Schutyser

Ulf Johansson

Pascal Kunz

Pieter Van Leemput

Johannes Keustermans

A method is provided for obtaining an estimation of the shape, position and/or orientation of one or more existing teeth of a patient or of one or more teeth to be included in a dental restoration destined to replace one or more missing teeth in a partially edentulous patient. The method involves adapting a virtual teeth setup to the intra-oral anatomical situation of the patient, wherein said virtual teeth setup includes separated surface meshes of individual teeth positioned in a dental arch or segment thereof. The virtual teeth setup is adapted by optimizing an energy function, which represents a quality measure for said virtual teeth setup, and using a statistical model, which describes for a given dentition or segment thereof a probability distribution for at least the shapes of individual teeth, the relations between shapes of neighbouring teeth and/or relations between positions and/or orientations of neighbouring teeth. The adapted virtual teeth setup resulting from said optimized energy function is subsequently used to estimate said sought for shape, position and/or orientation.

Method for estimating at least one of shape, position and orientation of a dental restoration

A method of producing a dental splint comprising the steps of: obtaining a set of 3D surface data, the 3D surface data representing a surface of a patient's oral situation, and generating a support structure model in dependence on the 3D surface data, and producing the dental splint in dependence on the support structure model, wherein a 3D distance map image of the 3D surface data is used to generate the support structure model.

Digital splint

In embodiment of the invention provides a method of producing a dental splint comprising the steps of: obtaining a set of 3D surface data, the 3D surface data representing a surface of a patient's oral situation, obtaining a support structure model describing a dental splint configured to fit to a portion of the surface of the patient's oral situation, modifying an apical edge of the support structure model in dependence on the 3D surface data, producing the dental splint in dependence on the modified support structure model.

Virtual splint

An embodiment of the invention provides a method of producing a surgical template comprising the steps of: obtaining a set of 3D surface data, the 3D surface data representing a surface of a patient's oral situation, obtaining a support structure model describing a surgical template configured to fit to a portion of the surface of the patient's oral situation, obtaining planned bore position data, the planned implant position data describing the longitudinal axes of a set of one or more planned implant bore holes relative to the 3D surface data, automatically modifying the support structure model to provide support material for guide holes in the support structure model corresponding to the one or more planned implant bore holes, producing the dental splint in dependence on the modified support structure model.

Surgical template

A method for capturing the shape of a dento-maxillofacial object out of volumetric image data of the dento-maxillofacial object is described. The method includes performing a segmentation of the volumetric image data with at least one calculated segmentation parameter indicative of the distinction between the dento-maxillofacial object and its background and derived from a calibration procedure. The method further includes capturing the shape of the dento-maxillofacial object from the segmented volumetric image data.

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Kessel-lo, Belgium

Veerle Wouters