Computer aided software tool for design of dental bar

"The aim of this research is to apply algorithms and develop software for the design and fabrication of a dental bar. The field of periodontics and oral surgery has been vastly relying on the traditional method of manufacturing dental restorations. The previous processes used for designing the dental restoration required dental acumen. One of the processes is the design of dental bar, which requires the dentist to determine the relative position and orientation of the dental implants so that a dental bar can be appropriately designed in terms of shape and dimensions. The dental bar has an integral bearing on which the ceramic denture clips. Our research is aimed at integrating existing mathematical algorithms and code them into computer software specially dedicated to designing dental bar. The software is complied with a Visual C .NET compiler, which is a platform independent programming language with the use of OpenGL graphics libraries and FLTK (Fast Light Toolkit) library. The required algorithms for data manipulation were verified using MATLAB. The main idea of the software development is to use the data obtained from the patient's mouth after the dental implants have been screwed to the patient’s mouth, analyze the acquired data, and then use it for the applied and developed algorithms and implemented algorithms to determine the position and orientation each of the healing abutments mounted on the dental implants. All these algorithms have been integrated in developing the software, and a Graphical User Interface (GUI) has been developed to help the user interact with the software with ease and to input data and visualize the output data from the software"--Abstract, page iii.