A review on computer-aided design and manufacturing of patient-specific maxillofacial implants

ABSTRACT

Introduction: Various prefabricated maxillofacial implants are used in the clinical routine for the surgical treatment of patients. In addition to these prefabricated implants, customized CAD/CAM implants become increasingly important for a more precise replacement of damaged anatomical structures. This paper reviews the design and manufacturing of patient-specific implants for the maxillofacial area.

Areas covered: The contribution of this publication is to give a state-of-the-art overview in the usage of customized facial implants. Moreover, it provides future perspectives, including 3D printing technologies, for the manufacturing of patient-individual facial implants that are based on patient’s data acquisitions, like Computed Tomography (CT) or Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI).

Expert opinion: The main target of this review is to present various designing software and 3D manufacturing technologies that have been applied to fabricate facial implants. In doing so, different CAD designing software’s are discussed, which are based on various methods and have been implemented and evaluated by researchers. Finally, recent 3D printing technologies that have been applied to manufacture patient-individual implants will be introduced and discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Computer-Aided design
• implant
• patient-specific
• maxillofacial
• 3D Printing

Article highlights

• The 3D printing technology has been widely used for patient-specific facial implant manufacturing, because it has the capability of fabricating very complex structures.

• Accuracy and surface finish of the implant can be enhanced by upgrading the software at the cost of time consumption.

• Researchers are working to simplify the design and manufacturing workflow of porous facial implants with user-friendly software in the future.

Declaration of interest

The authors have no relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript. This includes employment, consultancies, honoraria, stock ownership or options, expert testimony, grants or patents received or pending, or royalties.

Reviewer disclosures

Peer reviewers on this manuscript have no relevant financial or other relationships to disclose.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by grants from National Key R&D Program of China (2017YFB1104100), National Natural Science Foundation of China (81971709; 81828003; M-0019; 8191101624), the Foundation of Ministry of Education of China Science and Technology Development Center (2018C01038), the Foundation of Science and Technology Commission of Shanghai Municipality (19510712200), and Shanghai Jiao Tong University Foundation on Medical and Technological Joint Science Research (ZH20182DA15;YG2019ZDA06;ZH2018QNA23). In addition, it was supported by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) KLI 678-B31 and by CAMed (COMET K-Project 871132), which is funded by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Transport, Innovation and Technology (BMVIT), and the Austrian Federal Ministry for Digital and Economic Affairs (BMDW), and the Styrian Business Promotion Agency (SFG). Further, the TU Graz Lead Project ‘Mechanics, Modeling and Simulation of Aortic Dissection’. Finally, we want to acknowledge the Overseas Visiting Scholars Program from the Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) in China.