10 December 2024

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A Customized Smart CAM System for Digital Dentistry

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This paper presents an automated system for NC tool-path planning and generation of digital dental restoration. The process planning of an automated system has to do with well-ordered approaches, and accurate, efficient manufacture of work-pieces or parts, from initial to finished stages.

Traditionally, dental restoration making is a totally manual and labor-intensive work, and the computer aided design (CAD) /computer aided manufacturing (CAM) technology has rarely been utilized. In recent years, however, with the advancement of intra-oral scanning technology, more and more CAD/CAM technology is being applied to the design and production of dental restorations.

Since the operators are dental technicians who are mostly unfamiliar with CAD/CAM, it is important to have a customized and highly automated dental CAD/CAM system for the digital dental industry. General-purpose CAM system cannot be used in this case because long hours of tool-path programming and editing are required.

In order to reduce processing and editing time, a highly customized and “one-button” CAM system is developed in this work to reach automation and increase efficiency. The key is to capture and incorporate the domain knowledge of dental design and production into the tool-path programming process. In other words, the complicated process planning problem can be overcome by a knowledge-based approach, and the resulting machining plan can be realized by a 5-axis milling machine to directly produce dental restorations.

In this paper, we show that machining sequences of several different dental restorations, from simple to complex, can all be automatically planned and produced by the proposed system. A comparison between the automated system and the traditional manual approach is also presented and discussed.

Authors: Hong-Tzong Yau,Hsin-Chuan Chen, Ping-Jao Yu

Source: https://www.tandfonline.com/