2 Difference from conventional restorationĪlthough CAD/CAM dentistry was used in the mid-1980s, early efforts were considered a cumbersome novelty, requiring an inordinate amount of time to produce a viable product.Some mentions of "CAD/CAM" and "milling technology" in dental technology have loosely treated those two terms as if they were interchangeable, largely because before the 2010s, most CAD/CAM-directed manufacturing was CNC cutting, not additive manufacturing, so CAD/CAM and CNC were usually coinstantiated but whereas this loose/imprecise usage was once somewhat close to accurate, it no longer is, as the term "CAD/CAM" does not specify the method of production except that whatever method is used takes input from CAD/CAM, and today additive and subtractive methods are both widely used. Like other CAD/CAM fields, CAD/CAM dentistry uses subtractive processes (such as CNC milling) and additive processes (such as 3D printing) to produce physical instances from 3D models. However, to date, chairside CAD/CAM often involves extra time on the part of the dentist, and the fee is often at least two times higher than for conventional restorative treatments using lab services. Other goals include reducing unit cost and making affordable restorations and appliances that otherwise would have been prohibitively expensive. CAD/CAM complements earlier technologies used for these purposes by any combination of increasing the speed of design and creation increasing the convenience or simplicity of the design, creation, and insertion processes and making possible restorations and appliances that otherwise would have been infeasible. CAD/CAM technology allows the delivery of a well-fitting, aesthetic, and a durable prostheses for the patient. Such futuristic concepts, however, are all highly dependent on our abilities to analyze human decision processes and to translate these into mechanical equivalents if possible.Chrome-cobalt disc with bridges and crowns manufactured using WorkNC Dental CAD/CAMĬAD/CAM dentistry is a field of dentistry and prosthodontics using CAD/CAM ( computer-aided-design and computer-aided-manufacturing) to improve the design and creation of dental restorations, especially dental prostheses, including crowns, crown lays, veneers, inlays and onlays, fixed dental prostheses bridges, dental implant supported restorations, dentures ( removable or fixed), and orthodontic appliances. Expert systems might also come to change the way data are stored and retrieved in CAD/CAM systems, supplanting the hierarchical system with one that offers greater flexibility. Expert systems might involve the implementation of more abstract principles, such as the nature of gravity and friction, or the function and relation of commonly used parts, such as levers or nuts and bolts. The system could then mimic the engineer's thought pattern and actually "create" more of the design.
By including this and other information, the CAD system could then "know" what an expert engineer knows when that engineer creates a design. One example of an expert system involves incorporating information about the nature of materials-their weight, tensile strength, flexibility, and so on-into CAD software. This field is derived from research done in AI. Other limitations to CAD are being addressed by research and development in the field of expert systems.
One of the most important trends in CAD/CAM technologies is the ever-tighter integration between the design and manufacturing stages of CAD/CAM-based production processes. It was this source that resulted in the linkage between CAD and CAM.
The third source of CAD development resulted from efforts to facilitate the flow from the design process to the manufacturing process using numerical control (NC) technologies, which enjoyed widespread use in many applications by the mid-1960s. The use of computer modeling to test products was pioneered by high-tech industries like aerospace and semiconductors. The second source of CAD was in the testing of designs by simulation. One of the important time-saving advantages of computer modeling over traditional drafting methods is that the former can be quickly corrected or manipulated by changing a model's parameters. These developments were pioneered by the General Motors Research Laboratories in the early 1960s. The first source of CAD resulted from attempts to automate the drafting process. CAD had its origins in three separate sources, which also serve to highlight the basic operations that CAD systems provide.