Additive Manufacturing In Prosthetic Dentistry

Subtractive computer-aided design and manufacturing technique is revolutionary in dentistry providing lots of advantages such as accuracy, time and labour saving, prevention of cross-infection. Because this technique causes waste of more material compared to what is used in the final restoration, it has high cost. Requirement of cost reduction brought on development of additive manufacturing technique. This technique supplants traditional subtractive computer aided design and manufacturing technique enabling manufacturing of complex structures in a short time. The additive computer-aided design and manufacturing techniques used in prosthetic dentistry including working mechanism of the devices, materials used in each technique, comparison of the techniques and studies regarding these techniques have been explained. In addition to this, incomprehensible terms in Turkish literature have been tried to make clear. Key words: Computer-aided design; three dimensional printing; prosthodontics