New Material to Replace Extracted Human Teeth for Dental Research

There have been many studies on dental research, including the evaluation of dental ceramic materials for crown-restoration and testing dentine analog materials using laboratory-based mechanical fatigue and mechanical tests. However, extracting and using human teeth from the patient is becoming more challenging due to COVID-19, time constraints, and issues with size-standardization.

Dr. James Tsoi is Associate Professor in Dental Materials Science at the University of Hong Kong (HKU). He leads a research team with colleagues from Wuhan University, China and Drexel University, USA.https://www.hku.hk/press/c_news_detail_25846.html”>investigated New elliptical fistums were created from fiber-reinforced composites and their properties were compared to human dentine. The Study The title “Which dentine analog material can replace human dentine for the crown fatigue test?” This article has been published online at Dental Materials.

Materials were tested for mechanical strength and elastic modulus. Indentation hardness was also checked. The material’s tenacity under different loads is indicated by fatigue behavior.

The researchers uniformly fabricated the new dentine analog materials with specific sizes and shapes to mimic natural teeth, adhesively bonded them to lithium disilicate crowns, and subjected them to fatigue loading—the restorations showed comparable fatigue failure load and lifetime (durability) to those based on extracted human teeth.

Finite element analysis, a useful method to simulate physical phenomena using a numerical technique, showed promising results. Similar stress levels and distributions were found between dentine analog materials as well as extracted human teeth.

“This study evaluated the mechanical properties and fatigue behavior of dentine analog materials experimentally, analytically, and numerically, and found that a material with spectacular size and shape can reliably replace human dentine as the substrate in a ceramic crown fatigue test,” Dr. James Tsoi, the principal investigator, said that.