Prosthetically Guided Maxillofacial Rehabilitation Cad-CAM technology

As recently reported by a review of the literature from 1990 to 2011 (1), maxillofacial prosthesis are a reliable treatment option to restore maxillofacial defects and improve the quality of life of the patients who undergone cancer surgery. This book has born from the clinical experience during the last fifteen years, and it aims to describe the recent advances in using CAD-CAM technology for the construction of the extra-oral maxillofacial prostheses and of surgical guides and bone plates used in the maxillofacial bony reconstruction after cancer removal. The atlas form of the book allows readers to better understand and duplicate the procedure into their own clinical practice; the style of e-book allows the authors to update once a year the contents, giving to the reader the last findings in this research area. The approach of the authors to the extra-oral prosthetic rehabilitation is related to the concept that a good plastic surgery may be better than a facial prosthesis, and for this reason a maxillofacial prosthesis represents the last option to offer to the patient whenever a surgical attempt should be a failure in terms of aesthetics and function. Moreover, for the oral and maxillofacial reconstructive surgery the fibula free flap is still today the gold standard to restore wide defects, but from a prosthetic point of view a lot of rehabilitative problems are still present when a patient is scheduled for the final prosthetic rehabilitation after using the fibula free flap. Our clinical research has been intended to prevent this important problem, giving an indication to the surgeon before the beginning of the cancer surgery of where he/she has to position the vascularized graft as a function of the final prosthetic oral rehabilitation. From this problem, new solutions for the bone reconstruction were created: the scaffolds for the bone regenerative medicine whose use in a near future could substitute the use of the fibula free flap. A chapter describes the new research trend in this area. The editorial style of this e-book allows updating the data once a year, giving us to publish the more recent findings in the field of the Prosthetically Guided Maxillofacial Surgery 1. Ariani N, Visser A, van Oort RP, Kusdhany L, Rahardjo TB, Krom BP, van der Mei HC, Vissink A. Current state of craniofacial prosthetic rehabilitation. Int J Prosthodont. 2013 Jan-Feb;26(1):57-67.