ABSTRACT
The use of dental implants has increased exponentially over the years. Today, dental implant therapy is a reliable treatment with a high success rate. Thus, it is necessary to continually study the response of the surrounding bone tissue, since the implant changes the biomechanical environment of the mandible bone tissue, triggering the adaptation and remodelling of the bone tissue around the implant. Thus, the main objective of this work was to investigate the behaviour of remodelling of the mandibular bone structure, after the placement of a dental implant. In this way, computational simulation methods and techniques were used to simulate biological structures in a non-invasive and time efficient way. The numerical method used was a recently developed method: Natural Neighbour Radial Point Interpolation Method (NNRPIM). Moreover, to predict the remodelling of bone tissue, an algorithm was used, based on the assumption that bone reorganization depends mainly on mechanical stimuli. It was possible to observe that the algorithm predicts critical regions of high and low density, as found the ones found in clinical observations.
