Available online 27 March 2024

The All-on-4® treatment concept is a dental procedure that utilizes only four dental implants to support a fixed prosthesis, providing full-arch rehabilitation with affordable cost and speedy treatment courses. Although the placement of all-on-4® implants has been researched in the past, little attention was paid to the structural design of the prosthetic framework.

This research proposed a new approach to optimize the structure of denture framework called BESO-Net, which is a bidirectional evolutionary structural optimization (BESO) based convolutional neural network (CNN). The approach aimed to reduce the use of material for the framework, such as Ti–6Al–4V, while maintaining structural strength. The BESO-Net was designed as a one-dimensional CNN based on Inception V3, trained using finite element analysis (FEA) data from 14,994 design configurations, and evaluated its training performance, generalization capability, and computation efficiency.

The results suggested that BESO-Net accurately predicted the optimal structure of the denture framework in various mandibles with different implant and load settings. The average error was found to be 0.29% for compliance and 11.26% for shape error when compared to the traditional BESO combined with FEA. Additionally, the computational time required for structural optimization was significantly reduced from 6.5 h to 45 s.

The proposed approach demonstrates its applicability in clinical settings to quickly find personalized All-on-4® framework structure that can significantly reduce material consumption while maintaining sufficient stiffness.

Dental implantation

Finite element analysis

Machine learning

Dental prothesis design

© 2024 Association for Dental Sciences of the Republic of China. Publishing services by Elsevier B.V.