A Novel Method for Precise Guided Hole Fabrication of Dental Implant Surgical Guide Fabricated with 3D Printing Technology

Abstract

A dental implant surgical guide fabricated by 3-dimensional (3D) printing technology is widely used in clinical practice due to its convenience and fast fabrication. However, the 3D printing technology produces an incorrect guide hole due to the shrinkage of the resin materials, and in order to solve this, the guide hole is adjusted using a trimmer or a metal sleeve is attached to the guide hole. These methods can lead to another inaccuracy. The present method reports a technique to compensate for a decreased guide hole caused by shrinkage that can occur when a computer-guided implant surgical guide is fabricated with a 3D printer. The present report describes a technique to adjust the size of the guide hole using a free software program to identify the optimized guide hole size that is fabricated with the 3D printer.

Keywords

• surgical guide
• 3D printing
• guided hole
• dental CAD/CAM
• dental implant