Enabling In-Clinic Orthodontic Treatment Solutions with Advanced AI-Driven Digital Decision Support Systems and Novel Manufacturing Approaches

With _s_upport from Innovate UK's Biomedical Catalyst, Southwest SME Vitaware Ltd. and academic partners, Cardiff Dental School and University of Exeter's digital manufacturing research centre, X-AT, aim to address shortcomings in the current provision of clear aligners for orthodontic treatment.

Those looking to receive increasingly popular "Clear aligner" orthodontic treatment must currently make a choice between prohibitively expensive "dentist-led" solutions (such as Invisalign), or lower-cost, but clinically unsupervised "at-home" solutions where risk of dental damage is high. There is currently no means for patients to receive quality dentist-led treatment at an affordable price-point.

This industrial research project involves the exploration and development of a new proposed solution for deployment of clear aligner treatments to patients which facilitate efficient "In-Clinic" treatment planning directly by the orthodontic specialists overseeing treatments. This removes large fees involved in outsourcing to offshore technicians, which is the current favoured modus operandi for UK dental/orthodontic clinics due to the complexity of current solutions for designing treatment solutions in-clinic.

The proposed novel solution leverages a combination of AI/ML, physics-based simulation and researches optimised small-scale manufacture to streamline, expedite and de-skill the end-to-end clear aligner workflow. Such patient-specific treatments planned and overseen by specialists will promote superior outcomes and make clear aligners vastly more accessible to the majority of the British population.