Stereolithographic Surgical Templates for Placement of Dental Implants in Complex Cases

In recent years, dental implant rehabilitation has faced demands from prosthetic and esthetic arenas that call for increasingly ideal outcomes, which require precise surgical planning and placement. Anatomic limitations and bone quantity and quality can now be evaluated using more sophisticated radiographic techniques, although transferring this information to the surgical phase has been at best a difficult task. Recently, computer-aided design and manufacturing have made it possible to use data from computerized tomography to not only plan implant rehabilitation, but also to transfer this information to the surgery. One of these techniques uses stereolithography, a laser-driven polymerization process that fabricates an anatomic model and surgical templates. This novel approach is illustrated with two advanced cases, demonstrating that the technique not only allows for the precise translation of the treatment plan directly to the surgical field, but also offers many significant benefits over traditional procedures.