An Effective Modeling of Single Cores Prostheses Using Geometric Techniques

There has recently been a great demand for the artificial teeth prostheses that are made of materials sintered at 1500 8C, such as zirconia ceramic. It is, however, very difficult for dental technicians to manually fabricate the prostheses with such materials since their degree of strength is very high. For that reason, the prostheses of strong materials have been fabricated by using computer numerical control (CNC) machines. In the CNC fabrication, the most important subject is how accurately the prostheses can be modeled in three-dimensional (3D) space according to dentists’ requirements. In this paper, we propose effective methods for modeling single cores such as single caps and Conus cores, which are the principal ones of the artificial teeth prostheses. Our approach employs the two-dimensional Minkowski sum, a developed ZMap algorithm, and other geometric techniques such as the tiling of contours. We also present and analyze the 3D visual examples of the single cores modeled by the proposed methods. q 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.