An Easy and Quick Formulation of Patient-Specific 3D-FEM Dentate Mandible Model with Periodontal Ligament for Mechanical Analysis

Abstract

In recent years, the number of patients with mandibular defects is increasing, and the orthognathic surgery of mandible has become a common treatment for re-establishing functional and aesthetic anatomy by repositioning displaced skeletal elements. To decrease a heavy burden and high risk of the surgery falling on the patients and clinicians, the present authors have developed a mechanical support system for orthognathic surgery. An easy, quick and patient-specific mesh generation including the periodontal ligament is essential. First, a mandible template was obtained manually, which requests the small number of elements. It is composed of 7 different materials and could reproduce the original shape of each material pretty well with a reduced number of elements. Next the template of around 6600 nodes is mapped by a simple formula in a moment of time to fit the patient's mandible polygonal image obtained from an individual CT image. The calculation with the resulted patient-specific mesh by a 3D FEM code is also performed successfully.

Keywords

• fem
• patient specific model
• mandible
• tooth
• periodontal ligament