Development of a Dental CAD/CAM System Fabricating Dental Prostheses

Abstract

We have been developing new fabrication systems for dental prostheses using various processing technologies that were available in the general manufacturing industry. We recently developed a computer-aided fabrication system especially for crowns. The shape of the prepared tooth model was designed as three-dimension numerical value data by using a laser displace instrument. The data of the remarkable landmark were recognized automatically by the computer. Followed by designing crowns automatically by using these points in the computer. Based on the designed data, the crowns were fabricated automatically by the numerically controlled 4-axis milling machine. In our system, both the laser digitizer and the milling machine were composed in a compact unit. In this study, we evaluated the digitizing and cutting accuracies of clinically titanium crowns. Results indicated this system could produce titanium crowns with sufficient accuracy.