The use of surgical guides has become a standard in dental procedures. It is especially relevant for patients with edentulous jaws. However, the correct application of guides on edentulous jaws is associated with some difficulties. It is necessary to use special radiopaque markers to obtain initial information for computer planning. At the beginning of the operation, it is quite difficult to place and fix the template exactly in the planned position.
An alternative solution could be the use of bone-supported guides. This solution is not new and is known for its drawbacks. First of all, it is more traumatic compared to mucosa-supported guides. It is also problematic to obtain an accurate bone surface in advance.
However, the development of modern technologies allows for mitigating these disadvantages to some extent:
- Selective laser melting (SLM) allows for the creation of compact, strong, and precise templates that require minimal support area.
- Modern methods of bone tissue surface segmentation from CT data allow for obtaining an accurate bone surface even in the case of noisy DICOMs.
In addition to creating simple and disassemblable templates, the freemium software ImplaStation allows for the simple and quick creation of bone-supported templates. This is facilitated by the following features:
- Built-in automatic segmentation of bones and teeth
- Semi-automatic editor of segmentation results
- Module for creating surgical templates for any surface
- Built-in powerful STL surface editor with various trimming, merging, subtracting, and beam-adding functions.
