Assisted dental implant treatment

This application claims priority to U.S. Provisional Application No. 60/977,368, filed Oct. 3, 2007, the content of which is hereby incorporated by reference herein in its entirety.

Embodiments of the invention relate to systems and methods for use in the production and/or delivery of dental prostheses.

The practice of replacing missing teeth with man-made prosthetics dates to at least as early 700 BC, when the Etruscans made dentures from human or animal teeth. The first truly artificial teeth, made using porcelain, were first devised around 1770, and a British Patent for artificial teeth was granted in 1791 to De Chemant.

Since then, improvements in the design and manufacture of dental prosthetics have included the use of new materials, such as synthetic polymers and carbon fiber materials, as well as new methods of treatment planning. More recently, prosthetics have advanced from the traditional surface mounted denture, to the use of permanently mounted implants surgically inserted into the underlying jaw bone, and onto which an artificial tooth or set of teeth can be mounted. These implants provide a number of advantages, including improved stability, better fit, and greater comfort.

Along with the development of improved prosthetics have been advances in the planning and delivery of replacement teeth. For example, recent methods of treatment planning include the use of imaging data to produce a virtual treatment plan, for example, Simplant® computer software as referred to in U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2007/0059665 (Orentlicher et al.).

Virtual treatment planning systems are typically used to direct the fabrication of a surgical guide. For example, in the NobelGuide™ system, treatment planning software outputs are sent to a remote facility where a surgical guide is constructed by sterolithography techniques. The completed surgical guide is mounted in the patient\'s mouth and used by the dental surgeon to guide a surgical drill in order to form holes into which the implants are placed.

The use of prior art methods and devices for planning, manufacturing, and delivering dental prosthesis comes with certain limitations. For example, traditional dentures are often ill-fitting or uncomfortable for extended wear in many users. Slipping of the denture when chewing certain foods can also be problematic for patients with this kind of dental replacement.

While this problem has been partially overcome by the use of newer implant-based prosthetic systems, current implant technologies provide a less than optimal solution. For example, the present commercially available methods of applying treatment plans developed using medical imaging and software programs, to actual surgical procedures, involves the use of an intermediate surgical guide. Typically these surgical guides are fashioned by sterolithography, at a remote location, then packaged and sent to the dental professional for use in an implant procedure.

While it is possible to fashion surgical guides having acceptable fidelity with respect to the patient\'s oral surfaces and the virtual treatment plan, the use of these guides presents other problems. For example, the resins compatible for use in sterolithography processes are generally sensitive to moisture and ultraviolet light, as well as extremes of temperature. One manufacturer of guides warns not to allow the guide to be in contact with moisture for a period in excess of 30 minutes. The resins used for sterolithography are also generally not stable at temperatures commonly used for heat sterilization.

Production of guides by sterolithography is also relatively slow. Thus, using currently available methods and materials, an extended period of time is required to go from a first visit, the treatment planning, ordering of the surgical guide, and finally the surgical procedure and delivery of the prosthesis. This increases the cost, and reduces the attractiveness of dental implants as a prosthetic solution.

What would be desirable is a system that coordinates treatment planning, manufacture of the prosthesis, and the surgery and delivery of the prosthesis in such a way that the entire process could be accomplished within a relatively brief time period, for example within the course of a single day.

Accordingly, there is provided in some embodiments, a system, for planning an oral or facial endosseous implantation in a patient, comprising a processing module; a bone imaging module that communicates bone data to the processing module, the bone data representative of at least a portion of a bone of the skull of the patient; a surface imaging module that communicates surface data to the processing module, the surface data representative of at least a portion of a surface, of the patient, that is apart from the bone; wherein the processing module processes the bone data and the surface data into an output comprising three-dimensional (3-D) representation data indicative of at least one of an oral structure and a facial structure of the patient; a fabrication module that, based on the 3-D representation data, produces a physical model of the at least one of the patient\'s oral structure or facial structure, the model indicating a planned location of an endosseous implant.

In certain embodiments, a hole in the model indicates the planned location of the endosseous implant.

In certain embodiments, a surgical module, based on the 3-D representation data, guides implantation of the endosseous implant in the patient.

In certain embodiments, the bone comprises at least one of the mandible and the maxilla of the patient, and wherein the surface comprises an oral surface.

In certain embodiments, the oral surface comprises a surface of at least one of a gingiva, a tooth, and a dental prosthetic.

In certain embodiments, the system comprises a treatment planning module that, based on a combination of the 3-D representation data and input received from a treatment planner, outputs a treatment plan to a machine-readable medium, the treatment plan comprising a parameter for a planned hole in the portion of the bone; wherein the planned hole is configured to receive the endosseous implant; and wherein the parameter comprises at least one of a spatial location, a depth, a diameter, and an angular orientation of the planned hole.