Background and Objectives

Temporomandibular joint has been considered one of the most complex joints in human body. Dental articulation hinged upon temporomandibular joint is essential and fundamentally important for dental restoration design and prosthetic/orthodontic occlusion analysis. As digital dentistry rapidly grows, a complete digital work flow requires the use of a digital articulator for occlusion analysis. However, commercial CAD/CAM systems do not provide any method to verify the modeling accuracy of a digital articulator. There is also a lack of detail and generalized mathematical modeling of the digital articulator for simulating the jaw movement.

Methods

This paper presents the development of a digital articulator by mathematically modeling a general dental articulator which simulates the relative jaw motion between the maxilla and mandible. As the digital articulator moves, the digital upper teeth move relatively to the digital lower teeth, thus simulating the occlusal path with teeth collision detection function. To verify the accuracy of our modeled digital articulator, an improved optical tracking method is proposed to measure the pose of a mechanical articulator with 6 degrees of freedom and compare that with the digital articulator.

Results

The digital articulator system proposed in this paper achieves the following functions: 1. Digitalize the dental articulator with verified precision. Combined with dental design software, restorations can be designed with more efficiency and accuracy. 2. Provide an improved optical tracking method which can compare the movement error between the mechanical articulator and digital articulator. Thus the accuracy of the digital articulation can be verified. The result shows the error of our system is controlled under sub-millimeter which provides sufficient accuracy for the design of restoration under static and dynamic occlusion conditions.

Conclusions

We develop a general digital articulator which can simulate jaw movement between opposing teeth and an improved optical tracking method to verify the accuracy of the digital articulator. The modeling and accuracy verification of the digital articulator shows that there is a systematic and reliable way to replace traditional mechanical articulator and can close the gap for digital restoration fabrication.

中文翻译：

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数字式咬合架的建模及其使用光学测量的准确性验证。

背景和目标

颞下颌关节被认为是人体最复杂的关节之一。铰接在颞下颌关节上的牙齿咬合对于牙齿修复设计和修复/正畸咬合分析至关重要，并且从根本上来说很重要。随着数字牙科的快速发展，完整的数字工作流程需要使用数字咬合架进行咬合分析。但是，商用CAD / CAM系统没有提供任何方法来验证数字咬合架的建模准确性。还缺少用于模拟颌运动的数字咬合器的详细信息和广义数学模型。

方法

本文介绍了一种数字咬合架的发展，它是通过数学建模通用的咬合架来模拟上颌骨和下颌骨之间的相对颚运动。当数字咬合架移动时，数字上牙相对于数字下牙移动，从而通过牙齿碰撞检测功能模拟咬合路径。为了验证我们建模的数字咬合架的准确性，提出了一种改进的光学跟踪方法来测量具有6个自由度的机械咬合架的姿态并将其与数字咬合架进行比较。

结果

本文提出的数字咬合架系统实现以下功能：1.以经过验证的精度数字化咬合架。结合牙科设计软件，可以更高效，更准确地设计修复体。2.提供一种改进的光学跟踪方法，该方法可以比较机械咬合架和数字咬合架之间的运动误差。因此，可以验证数字发音的准确性。结果表明，我们的系统误差控制在亚毫米以下，这为静态和动态咬合条件下的修复设计提供了足够的精度。

结论

我们开发了一种通用的数字咬合架，该咬合架可以模拟相对牙齿之间的颌骨运动，并开发了一种改进的光学跟踪方法来验证数字咬合架的准确性。数字咬合架的建模和精度验证表明，有一种系统可靠的方法可以替代传统的机械咬合架，并且可以弥补数字修复体制造的空白。