Past, Present and Future of Finite Element Analysis in Dentistry

Biomechanics is fundamental to any dental practice, including dental restorations, movement of misaligned teeth, implant design, dental trauma, surgical removal of impacted teeth, and craniofacial growth modification. Following functional load, stresses and strains are created inside the biological structures. Stress at any point in the construction is critical and governs failure of the prostheses, remodeling of bone, and type of tooth movement. However, in vivo methods that directly measure internal stresses without altering the tissues do not currently exist. The advances in computer modeling techniques provide another option to realistically estimate stress distribution. Finite element analysis (FEA), a computer simulation technique, was introduced in the 1950s using the mathematical matrix analysis of structures to continuum bodies (Zienkiewicz and Kelly 1982). Over the past 30 years, FEA has become widely used to predict the biomechanical performance of various medical devices and biological tissues due to the ease of assessing irregular-shaped objects composed of several different materials with mixed boundary conditions. Unlike other methods (e.g., strain gauge) which are limited to points on the surface, the finite element method (FEM) can quantify stresses and displacement throughout the anatomy of a three dimensional structure.