Numerical Method for the Design of Healing Chamber in Additive-Manufactured Dental Implants

The inclusion of a healing chamber in dental implants has been shown to promote biological healing. In this paper, a novel numerical approach to the design of the healing chamber for additive-manufactured dental implants is proposed. This study developed an algorithm for the modeling of bone growth and employed finite element method in ANSYS to facilitate the design of healing chambers with a highly complex configuration. The model was then applied to the design of dental implants for insertion into the posterior maxillary bones. Two types of ITI (R) solid cylindrical screwed implant with extra rectangular-shaped healing chamber as an initial design are adopted, with which to evaluate the proposed system. This resulted in several configurations for the healing chamber, which were then evaluated based on the corresponding volume fraction of healthy surrounding bone. The best of these implants resulted in a healing chamber surrounded by around 9.2% more healthy bone than that obtained from the original design. The optimal design increased the contact area between the bone and implant by around 52.9%, which is expected to have a significant effect on osseointegration. The proposed approach is highly efficient which typically completes the optimization of each implant within 3-5 days on an ordinary personal computer. It is also sufficiently general to permit extension to various loading conditions.