Digital documentation of individual human jaw and tooth forms for applications in orthodontics, oral surgery and forensic medicine

On account of the complex geometry of individual maxillary sinus and teeth, the classical approach for documentation in orthodontics is casting in plaster. There are millions of individual plaster forms taken from orthodontic patients, that need to be stored, sorted and accessed-depending on the local legislation-for periods up to decades. As an alternative to plaster casting archives we propose a digital solution for long-term archivation of the complex geometrical patient data in orthodontics and oral surgery. The paper includes the description of the used scanning methods and the hardware set-up. Further the applied algorithms for automatic 3D-modeling and visualization are described. The contribution describes the actual application, some representative results and offers some proposals for other application fields of digital documentation.