Finite element based bone remodeling and resonance frequency analysis for osseointegration assessment of dental implants

Finite Element Analysis (FEA) has been extensively used in design of new prostheses for characterizing biomechanical responses induced in human body. Dental implant, as one of such typical devices, has undergone a rapid development and clinical applications over the last two decades, where FEA has played an important role. One challenge faced by dental profession, however, is the way to assess the oral bone's osseointegration and remodeling in peri-implant region post surgery. Biomechanically, implantation largely changes local oral environment, subsequently resulting in bone apposition or resorption to adapt such a mechanical change. It is thus of significant interest to relate the bone remodeling to biomechanical responses in a non-invasive way. In this paper, we assess the change in the resonance frequency (or namely natural frequency) in line with the remodeling results from a time-dependent three-dimensional finite element simulation. A quantitative comparison was made against the resonance frequencies measured from the clinical follow-ups. The comparison demonstrated a satisfactory agreement between the developed bone remodeling simulation and clinical data, thus validating the computational prediction

Computational fracture modelling in bioceramic structures

Bioceramics have rapidly emerged as one of major biomaterials in modern biomedical applications because of its outstanding biocompatibility. However, one drawback is its low tensile strength and fracture toughness due to brittleness and inherent microstructural defects, which to a certain extent prevents the ceramics from fully replacing metals used as load-bearing prostheses. This paper aims to model the crack initiation and propagation in ceramic fixed partial denture, namely dental bridge, by using two recently developed methods namely continuum-to-discrete element method (CDEM) in ELFEN and extended finite element methods (XFEM) in ABAQUS. Unlike most existing studies that typically required prescriptions of initial cracks, these two new approaches will model crack initiation and propagation automatically. They are applied to a typical prosthodontic example, thereby demonstrating their applicability and effectiveness in biomedical applications