Biomechanical Analysis of Bone Tissue After Insertion of Dental Implants Using Meshless Methods: Stress Analysis and Osseointegration

Abstract

Nowadays, one of the most effective therapies to treat partial edentulous or total edentulous patients is the surgical insertion of dental implants with a prosthetic tooth crown. This type of solution holds much interest since, during the masticatory activity, these fixed prostheses allow load transfer, efficiently and smoothly, to the bone tissue.

Therefore this study combines a bone tissue remodeling algorithm with the Natural Neighbor Radial Point Interpolation Method (NNRPIM), predicting osseointegration of the dental implant and adaptation of the trabecular bone architecture due to the insertion of the implant.

The NNRPIM is applied to numerically evaluate bone tissue's response since it is considered a highly efficient meshless discretization technique. NNRPIM is capable of predicting strain/stress fields with high accuracy, which allows understanding with precision how the insertion of a dental implant influences the strain/stress distributions in the bone tissue surrounding the implant. Moreover, NNRPIM has a great advantage, since its discretization only requires the nodal distribution, which can be directly obtained from medical images. Also, NNRPIM is considered a “truly meshless method” since it uses the natural neighbor mathematical concept and the Voronoï diagram to set the nodal connectivity and to construct the background integration mesh (required to integrate the weak form of Galerkin). Nevertheless, this work compares NNRPIM's results with clinical observations and solutions obtained with the finite element method (FEM) to validate the use of this meshless technique.