An Approach to Dental CAD/CAM(Part 2)　Measurement with 3D Point Digitizer and Spline Interpolation

Abstract

Studies have been undertaken to apply the CAD/CAM system to Dentistry and to make prosthetic appliances automatically. 3D measurements were made with a digitizer developed from the portable 3D modeling machine with sensing functions. The specimen was a 4 times larger plaster model. The outstanding merit of this method is that the measuring points can be selected by the operator or the dentist. Interpolation of these 3D data using spline function gave just as good results as those obtained using linear interpolation. Spline interpolation was very useful in cases having few points as in the present sample. This method was concluded to be in our Dental CAD/CAM system.