Study On Application Of Digital Technology In Lingual Orthodontics

Malocclusion is one of the most common oral diseases,not only damaging the health of the teeth,but resulting in aesthetic problem.It has attracted the attention of a growing number of people.As the most multiple functional appliances,the fixed appliance is used in the widest range in the clinical treatment.Due to the invisible characteristics,which will not cause any negative influence on aesthetics during the treatment process,patients are interested more in the lingual appliances as an approach to malocclusion correction.However,the conventional lingual appliances are locked into several disadvantages such as the difficulty and complexity of precisely position,high loss rate of the bracket,the finishing process is time-consuming,and the average quality falls far short of that of labial cases,that most orthodontists fail to offer their patients a lingual appliance as an optional treatment method.In the light of this situation,it is great significant to develop a friendly-used lingual appliance system on both satisfying the demand from the patients and pursuing its commercial value.As the fixed appliance,the lingual fixed appliances have the same mechanism of action as the labial.The development of appliance design is one of the most significant achievements in the field of orthodontics in the past 30-40 years,and the labial fixed appliances have been the mature products.To have the theoretical principle for designing the lingual fixed appliance,the author studied the structure of the labial fixed appliance.Based on the digital technology,this study puts forward an approach to design and manufacture the customized lingual orthodontic appliance.This approach adopts 3D laser scanning and technology of remodeling with CBCT data to create the patients,digital dental models,which used as the original data for designing customized appliance.It also adopts the virtual set-up,which created virtually by separating and realigning each tooth in the software,to prepare for the furthering designing.Furthermore,the virtual set-up model which made of point cloud data need to be transferred to NURBS surface by reversing engineering so that the designing work can be conducted in the CAD software.Finally,completing the designing of the customized brackets and wire in the CAD software,and manufacturing them by the Rapid Prototyping machine and wire bending robot.This paper systematically study on developing the customized lingual appliance,and the software and hardware techniques involved in this system were thoroughly learned.Based on the understanding of its realization both in the virtual and real world,some valuable suggestions can be made for building a special software platform for the fabrication of the customized lingual appliance.However,more detailed analysis work still needed to be done on the whole design and manufacturing system before it is carried into commercial running.