Research and Development in Virtual Engineering

Expert System for Automatic Dental Prosthetic Design

© Fraunhofer IFF

CAD and CAM that manufacture dental prosthetics have evolved into an important part of dentistry and are increasingly being relied on. Digital process chains are thus replacing part of the complete manual production chain (see illustration). They encompass digitization with a scan of the set of teeth, the modeling of the dental prosthetic on a PC with special CAD software and their automatic production with CAM systems or rapid prototyping.

© Fraunhofer IFF
Conventional and digital methods side-by-side.

New materials and technologies are constantly advancing developments. Among other things, they are intended to replace time-consuming manual work steps with new, faster procedures and assure that quality is constantly high. The modeling of dental prosthetics on a PC, the “CAD step” (see illustration) will hardly become less complex. We are therefore collaborating with Baumgart Dentalmanufaktur on the development of methods that will automate and thus simplify and expedite the process of dental prosthetic design.

This project was funded by the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology by resolution of the German Bundestag.