T-RecS: A Dental CAD-System for the Next Millennium

Dental CAD/CAM has become clinical reality. The number of commercially available dental CAD/CAM-systems is growing. All of them offer manual or semi-automated production of dental restorations. The complexity and the application area of the systems comprise all from manual copy milling of inlays to full computer-controlled systems with complex libraries of tooth forms. Potential inaccuracies associated with the traditional, multistage production of indirect restorations are eliminated. However, the user-interaction and therefore the learning curve are quite high. The dentists partially spend a lot of time and money for the handling of the respective system. In this paper, we present T-RecS, an integrated dental CAD-system for automatic tooth reconstruction. Tooth surfaces are automatically reconstructed by adapting an appropriate tooth model. The original shape is reconstructed by the model and its adjustments to the remaining intact tooth surface. While conventional systems require more or less user interaction respectively three-dimensional power of imagination for the construction of an inlay, we provide a fully automated system by integrating dental medical knowledge and its exploitation as deformable models.