A NUMERICAL APPROACH OF ESTIMATING DENTAL IMPLANT HEALING PROCESS USING RESONANCE FREQUENCY ANALYSIS (RFA)

This paper investigates primary stability of dental implant that indicates the process of bone-implant integration. This integration is known to happen at the boundary of the bone and dental implant contact surface. The resonance frequency of dental implant is used as the parameter for this investigation due to its high sensitivity to boundary condition variations. In this study, resonance frequency analysis (RFA) of the jaw-implant structure is carried out using finite element modeling. The FEM analyses are conducted in ANSYS modal analysis simulation environment. The FEM model of the structure includes titanium implant, Cancellous and cortical bone. Different implant-bone interface conditions are studied for this investigation. Various boundary conditions were studied to identify natural frequencies of jaw-implant structure. Our analysis shows that the resonance frequency of the implant increases during the healing period and reaches a plateau when the implant-bone interface was fully integrated. The results show that RFA could be suggested as a non-invasive, reliable and accurate diagnostic method for early assessment of the healing stages.