Computer-assisted surgical navigation system in dental implantology

A novel surgical navigation system, including both pre-surgical planning and 3D real-time navigation for dental implantology, is described in this paper The two subsystems in such all-in-one system are seamless linked together so that the image data can be shared within both subsystems and achieve higher accuracy and efficiency. Due to a tight connection between pre-surgical planning and 3D real-time navigation, the depth of drilling and the implant placement in surgical navigation match exactly with the ones in pre-surgical planning, which assure the security and accuracy. With the assistance of an optical position sensor, the real-time guidance provides sufficient information for dentists during the surgical procedure. The experiments in phantom study demonstrate that the mean errors of the depth and the angle are 0.7719 +/- 0.24358 (mm) and 0.5541 +/- 0.22996 (degree) respectively.