Automatic planning of maxillary anterior dental implant based on prosthetically guided and pose evaluation indicator

Preoperative planning of maxillary anterior dental implant is a prerequisite to ensuring that the implant achieves the proper three-dimensional (3D) pose, which is essential for its long-term stability. However, the current planning process is labor-intensive and subjective, relying heavily on the surgeon's experience. Consequently, this paper proposes an automatic method for computing the optimal pose of the dental implant.

The method adopts the principle of prosthetically guided dental implant placement. Initially, the prosthesis coordinate system is established to determine the implant candidate orientations. Subsequently, virtual slices of the maxilla in the buccal–palatal direction are generated according to the prosthesis position. By extracting feature points from the virtual slices, the implant candidate starting points are acquired. Then, a candidate pose set is obtained by combining these candidate starting points and orientations. Finally, a pose evaluation indicator is introduced to determine the optimal implant pose from this set.

Twenty-two cases were utilized to validate the method. The results show that the method could determine an ideal pose for the dental implant, with the average minimum distance between the implant and the left tooth root, the right tooth root, the palatal side, and the buccal side being \(2.57\pm 0.53\) $2.57\pm 0.53$ mm, \(2.59\pm 0.65\) $2.59\pm 0.65$ mm, \(0.74\pm 0.19\) $0.74\pm 0.19$ mm, \(1.83\pm 0.16\) $1.83\pm 0.16$ mm, respectively. The planning time was less than 9 s.

Unlike manual planning, the proposed method can efficiently and accurately complete maxillary anterior dental implant planning, providing a theoretical analysis of the success rate of the implant. Thus, it has great potential for future clinical application.