The overall goal of this development is a low cost automated fabrication system for indirect, all-ceramic and polymer composite restorations as alternatives to amalgam. Ceramic and polymer composite restorations are available and have shown good results clinically, but are not widely used because of their relatively high cost and/or laboratory processing requirements compared to Dental amalgam. It is anticipated the proposed system will offer faster, lower cost process compared to Dental the conventional and newer CAD-CAM based fabrication techniques (e.g., CEREC II for chairside and Procera for laboratory processing). The fabrication system will be based on rapid prototyping techniques (i.e., additive, layer-by-layer freeform fabrication) and will create all-ceramic and polymer composite Dental restorations directly from three-dimensional (3D) imaging data. The complete system will consist of a 3D intraoral camera for collecting the surface profile of the restoration site, CAD software for creating occlusal and proximal surfaces, an automated fabrication machine that builds the restoration directly from CAD file generated from the scan data, and post processing equipment to fully cure or sinter the restoration making it ready for insertion. Phase I goals are to demonstrate the new process can produce durable Dental restorations with good material properties and accuracy of fit.
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