Mandibular Teeth Movement Variations in Tipping Scenario: A Finite Element Study on Several Patients

Abstract

Previous studies on computational modeling of tooth movement in orthodontic treatments are limited to a single model and fail in generalizing the simulation results to other patients. To this end, we consider multiple patients and focus on tooth movement variations under the identical load and boundary conditions both for intra-and interpatient analyses. We introduce a novel computational analysis tool based on finite element models (FEMs) addressing how to assess initial tooth displacement in the mandibular dentition across different patients for uncontrolled tipping scenarios with different load magnitudes applied to the mandibular dentition. This is done by modeling the movement of each patient's tooth as a nonlinear function of both load and tooth size. As the size of tooth can affect the resulting tooth displacement, a combination of two clinical biomarkers obtained from the tooth anatomy, i.e., crown height and root volume, is considered to make the proposed model generalizable to different patients and teeth.

A multi-patient analysis of the center of rotation trajectories using finite element models of the human mandible

“…A mesh convergence study is performed to obtain an optimal mesh size for the FE models [5] by iteratively increasing the number of elements per step with a factor of 2. We continue the process until the relative stress error does not exceed 4% of maximum von Mises stress.…”

“…Tooth movement modeling in an uncontrolled tipping scenario using a perpendicular loading system has been widely used for initial tooth movement simulations due to its simplicity [5]. However, in addition to the uncontrolled tipping movements, different tooth movements such as the pure translation, crown/root tipping, intrusion/extrusion, or a combination of them are typically required for tooth position correction in orthodontic treatments.…”