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E. Kounis:
"Development of a Computer Interface for the Design of Root Analogue Dental Implants";
Betreuer/in(nen): D. H. Pahr; Institut für Leichtbau und Struktur-Biomechanik, TU Wien; Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 2013.

During the past few years there was a novel and promising idea introduced to the field of dental implantology - so called "root analogue dental implants". Unfortunately, up to now the procedure for this new implant technology is based on the original tooth and requires the extraction of the tooth from the patient´s tooth socket prior to the insertion of the implant. The design and needed modifications of the tooth shape a currently done in a manual way.

This thesis aims to simplify the above described process by moving the working steps to a computer. This requires the use of dental Computer Tomography (CT also known as DVT) scan and the development of a computer software for the mentioned purposes.

Several methods for each task were evaluated in order to achieve these aims. Procedures to segment the tooth from a CT scan were investigated and a 3D modeling tool was developed to create and modify the implant shape on the computer before sending it to the manufacturing device.

Challenges have to be managed in the image processing and code development part of this thesis. An active contour segmentation of the tooth was applied based on ITK-Snap followed by the segmentation of the jaw mainly based in the in-house tool Medtool. The tooth manipulation was based on triangulated surfaces by using Blender options like re-mesh, boolean operations, and sculpting. With the use of the presented approach the design of a root analogue implant can now be completed in less than an hour. Perhaps the most significant advantage gained is that the extraction of a tooth and the insertion of a root analogue implant can be done on the same day, which was not possible up to know and is a very convenient for a patient.