DESIGN OF A MAXILLOFACIAL PROSTHESIS BASED ON TOPOLOGY OPTIMIZATION.

The use of custom implants has recently gained increasing importance in craniofacial surgery in order to optimize preoperative planning and reduce operative time. The design of patient-specific implants plays an important role to restore craniofacial bone. Nevertheless, the design method has become the bottleneck. In this study, a new design method of a maxillofacial prosthesis based on the topology optimization was proposed to realize lightweight custom implants. At first, parametric predesign of the optimized model was carried out to ensure that the optimized model conformed to the main physiological anatomical structure and recover basic function structure. Then, the design region is defined under given load and boundary conditions. The material interpolation technique of SIMP with the penalization factor is adopted to get the final optimized 3D model. Finally, the experimental results verify that the method of topology optimization for the maxillofacial prosthesis proposed is efficient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]