In recent years, the number of patients with mandibular defects is increasing, and the orthognathic surgery of mandible has become a common treatment for re-establishing functional and aesthetic anatomy by repositioning displaced skeletal elements. To decrease a heavy burden and high risk of the surgery falling on the patients and clinicians, the present authors have developed a mechanical support system for orthognathic surgery. An easy, quick and patient-specific mesh generation including the periodontal ligament is essential. First, a mandible template was obtained manually, which requests the small number of elements. It is composed of 7 different materials and could reproduce the original shape of each material pretty well with a reduced number of elements. Next the template of around 6600 nodes is mapped by a simple formula in a moment of time to fit the patient's mandible polygonal image obtained from an individual CT image. The calculation with the resulted patient-specific mesh by a 3D FEM code is also performed successfully.

Keywords

FEM, Patient Specific Model, Mandible, Tooth, Periodontal Ligament

Paper information

Yoshihiro TAKAO, Junpei TAKAHASHI, Masahiko TERAJIMA, Wen-Xue WANG and Akihiko NAKASHIMA, “An Easy and Quick Formulation of Patient-Specific 3D-FEM Dentate Mandible Model with Periodontal Ligament for Mechanical Analysis”, Journal of Biomechanical Science and Engineering, Vol. 4, No. 4 (2009), pp.550-561 . doi:10.1299/jbse.4.550