Cavity preparation using a navigated controlled Er:Yag laser: Comparison of two approaches

In this contribution, a comparison between two approaches for creating cylindrical holes for dental implants by using an automatically power-controlled laser system is presented. The usage of laser systems for preparing cavities in dental implantology has different advantages over using conventional drills. However, wrong handling of a manually guided laser handpiece can lead to damage of the surrounding tissue. In order to automatically control the power of a manually guided laser handpiece, different approaches were developed. Two of them are compared in this work. The first approach calculates the bone removal based on volume elements (voxels). The second approach is a geometrical based concept. These two approaches will be compared with regard to their shape accuracy. Therefore, cavities were created in a plaster-phantom. Afterwards, the deviation between the planned shape and the shape created by each of these systems was measured. It turned out that the use of the geometrical based concept achieves higher accuracy than the volume based concept.