Integrated approaches for personalised cranio-maxillofacial implant design and manufacturing

Abstract

Personalised implant design based on CT/MRI data has been developed since 1990s and commercially available in recent years. Although the technology brings in the well-recognised benefits, the number of clinical cases is still limited and the technology has not been widely applied for the treatment in hospitals due to the complexity of the technology, the high cost of implants and the lack of human resources in the area of biomodeling in hospitals. Especially, the closely multidisciplinary collaboration among radiologists, surgeons, and biomedical engineers is always needed during the design and manufacturing steps of the implant. In addition, the optimal solutions for investment of hardware and software are not easily obtained. In this paper, the integrated approaches for personalised cranio-maxillofacial implant design & manufacturing are presented. It covers the wide range of technical solutions based on the available design & manufacturing technologies. Different implant design methods based on different input data, medical image processing and geometrical modeling tools will be emphasized. Finally, the aspects related to the design for manufacturability of the implants are also discussed to utilize effectively limited hardware & software tools. © Springer-Verlag 2010.