Researchers in Hong Kong, cognizant of the drawbacks associated with CAD/CAM-driven crown design, have created an algorithm that produces crowns “that resemble the morphology and biomechanics of natural teeth”.
While CAD/CAM technology has had a beneficial impact on workflow efficiency, it remains, notes an article in the , a “still labour-intensive and time-consuming, particularly because of the need for customisation for each patient”.
While the creation of dental prostheses has seen considerable improvement thanks to the use of this technology, there are issues such as remakes being required due to what’s termed “marginal misfits” along with health and environmental hazards associated with 3D-printing and milling processes.
The researchers, headed by lead author Dr Hao Ding from the University of Hong Kong, trained the algorithm to create increasingly accurate crowns.
“During the training process, natural teeth morphological features were learned by the algorithm, so that it can design dental crowns comparable to a natural tooth—both morphologically and functionally,” said Dr Hao Ding via a media release.
The generative AI-designed crowns were found to have a lifespan comparable to natural teeth, a marked contrast to other methods of producing crowns which the articles observes, produce “crowns that were either too large or too thin and failed to reach the same lifespan as that of natural teeth”.
“This demonstrates that [the algorithm] could be utilised to design personalised dental crowns with high accuracy that can not only mimic both the morphology and biomechanics of natural teeth, but also operate without any additional human fine-tuning, thus saving additional costs in the production process,” added senior researcher Dr James Tsoi, an associate professor in dental materials science at the university.
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