10 October 2019

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Report from Academy of Dental Materials annual meeting 2019

Simona Chirico

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Jackson Hole (Wyoming, USA) hosted the annual meeting of the Academy of Dental Materials (ADM) in the first week of October, entitled:  "Materials to Enable the Evolution/Revolution of Digital Dentistry".

Dentistry33 was present.

Among the topics dealt with is that of digital dentistry which, thanks to the reports of the authoritative speakers present, has been gutted in its various forms. Below are summarized the most salient points of some speakers of the Congress that most intrigued us.

Diane Rekow (NYU/King’s College London) in her lecture showed the new state of art of digital dentistry and the digital applications fields: 

• patient interaction: consulation, shared treatment, decisions, which healthy behaviors the patients should adopt
• CAD/CAM: restorations,  surgery guides and practice models, tissue scaffolds
• clinical activities: interprofessional consultations, treatment plans, robot assisted treatments, clinical research
• education: distance learning, haptics and simulation robots
• other enabled activities: forensics, epidemiology, clinical and practice based research.

Bart Vandenberghe (Advimago, Center for Advanced Oral Imaging, Brussels) in his lecture dealt with the crucial role of imaging, in particular CBCT, in which three-dimensional solutions, for diagnostic tests, will be increasingly used in the future as an analysis tool in all fields of dentistry. In particular, He shows how important it is to have clear and correct 3D images with the right choice of voxels, because this is the only way to make a correct diagnosis.

Steven Sadowsky (University of The Pacific) in his lecture showed the importance of zirconia in Implant Prosthodontics. In particular he has deepened: 

• The importance of zirconia implants highlighting: as these allow angles abutments and abutments for overdentures; showed morphologies that would be preferable when initial stability is not optimal; as these allow more latitude with bony constraints/augmentation and allow abutment replacement.
• Zirconia abutments highlighting: at 5/7 years the abutments for zirconium implants with titanium base have obtained biological and mechanical results similar to those in titanium with improved aesthetics; a limitation of this project remains in patients with high applied forces or in the scenarios of platform switching

Christopher Bowman (University of Colorado) – in his lecture dealt with the "Dynamic Covalent Networks in Dental Polymer". He showed that implementation of dynamic covalent chemistry in dental and other materials represents a powerful approach to identify and control polymer properties. Control is possibile of: type of reaction, on/off trigger, timescale od reactions, implementation relative to the lifestyle of the material.

Next "Academy Dental Materials annual meeting" will be in Dublin on October 2020. Stay tuned!!!