Real dentists look away now.
Polygonica excels at modelling with polygon meshes without the requirement for expensive and complex reverse engineering to BREP-based CAD. This situation is common in medical and dental workflows where a variety of types of scan, from CT imaging to hand-held intra-oral scanners, are used to create source data specific to a single patient.
The scanner results can be converted to polygon meshes using the scanning software provided or even using Polygonica’s own scan to mesh algorithms. The results, usually noisy and incomplete, can be tidied and fixed using a variety of algorithms provided by Polygonica including tolerance-based decimation, curvature-sensitive hole-filling, mesh healing, self-intersection fixing, noise shell removal, smoothing, fairing, trimming, remeshing and even advanced feature detection to facilitate feature-based registration.
But what then?
Reverse engineering a complex scan of organic shapes such as teeth or bones is difficult – and often unnecessary. A number of Polygonica customers such as Renishaw, Simpleware, MediaLab, 3D Systems’ CimatronE and ANSYS Spaceclaim implement advanced custom-modelling solutions based directly on the polygon mesh.
This short blog illustrates a couple of examples of modelling with polygon meshes using Polygonica. Of course we’re software folk, not dentists, so real dentists are advised to look away now.
Tooth-born surgical guide creation
This short sequence show how Polygonica’s Boolean, offsetting, hollowing and geometry creation functions can be used to rapidly create a tooth-born guide from a scanned mesh of a patient’s mouth. Additionally a unique identifier is embossed onto the guide using Polygonica’s imprint, emboss and deboss functions.
Although not shown Polygonica’s fast mesh clash detection algorithms can be used to ensure correct and safe positioning of drill guides and guide cylinders.
free using Polygonica’s automatic healing and curvature-sensitive hole-filling
The drill guides and guide cylinders are created using Polygonica’s profile sweeps and then
merged with the guide using Polygonica’s Boolean subtraction and union. Clash detection
is used to ensure correct placement. Finally the patient’s unique identifier is embossed onto
the guide using Polygonica’s imprint, embossing and debossing algorithms.
Undercut removal and guide creation
There are many cases in dental modelling where concave undercut regions need to be identified and managed – for example when designing guide geometry to ensure the guide itself can slide over the teeth.
In this sequence Polygonica’s sweeps are used to remove undercuts in order to ensure that the offset geometry for the guide can be physically placed and removed.
This ensures the guide geometry can fit onto the tooth.
Polygonica’s mesh modelling functionality is growing rapidly with each major release and now spans the entire scan to print workflow:
- creating meshes from scans,
- advanced repair such as foldover detection and removal and margin line sensitive hole fill,
- a wide range of mesh selection, feature recognition and modelling operations,
- print preparation tools such as healing, hollowing, lattice clipping and support region generation
- advanced 2D operations for build processors such as hatching and infill.
To find out more please contact us via https://www.polygonica.com/contact-us/
