Oral Implantology and Bioengineering: From “Digital Guided Surgery” to Personalized Medicine

Implantology in a branch of oral surgery, it deals with the replacement of missing teeth with the use of dental implants, which can be used to replace a single tooth or as supports for fixed bridges or for anchoring mobile prostheses. The new computer-guided technologies allow the dentist to carry out implantology interventions by exploiting, for the insertion of dental implants, the areas of the maxillary or mandibular bone in which there has been a greater preservation of bone material. The purpose of this study is to guide the positioning of the implants, not only on the basis of what the prosthetic rehabilitation will be, but also on the basis of the patient's anatomical conditions, and on this general framework to carry out a finite element study that can predict the behavior of the implant fixtures and therefore improve their planning, with the ultimate aim of placing the implants in the best possible point, from an anatomical-prosthetic-biomechanical point of view, thus creating a digitally guided surgery. Having such an instrument, defined as, chair-side, available to the dentist, would be a very important goal. Unfortunately, these simulations still require very high performance and expensive hardware, and the simulation times are very long. Among other things, the software is not easy to use and a dentist, albeit helped by a dental technician (who by now has necessarily had to apply himself to the digital world) does not have the skills or tools necessary to carry out this type of work. The possibility of carrying out a simulation of this type, after having performed simple instrumental examinations which are now part of clinical practice, would allow simple and complex safe rehabilitations not only in the short but also in the long term.