The effect of Uncertainty of dental implant morphology on osseointegration

Dental implants have attracted significant attention and been well accepted as the most effective treatment to partially or fully edentulous patients, among which osseointegrated dental implants have a great potential to achieve desirable and predictable outcomes [1]. In order to further increase success rate of implantation and reduce healing time, an improved osseointegration quality is believed to be achieved by porous-coated morphology. A 18 month trial has been conducted on a partially porous-coated endosseous dental implant with traditional threads, and the histological data clearly indicated a shortened stabilizing time of implantation and dramatically increased contact area over all porous-coated samples to threaded ones [2]. To model such a scenario, we applied multi-scale finite element analysis technique to a 2D dental implant model over a 48 month remodelling process, where the displacement responses from a macro-scale model was transferred to the localized micro-scale model with detailed porous surface morphology characteristics [3, 4]. However, this piece of work was based upon a deterministic model of coating and particles/beads in the micro model and did not capture the random feature of coating process.