Abstract: The prosthetic tooth surface design is an important issue in dental computer aided design systems(CAD). The designed tooth shape should fit to the patient’s tooth articulation environment and keep the topological features of the generic teeth. Aiming at the problem, a 3D deformation approach for prosthetic dental surface design based on feature mapping is presented. The main idea is by identifying the corresponding feature points between the preparation tooth and the standard tooth firstly, using a suitable radial basis function to define the feature mapping relations in both teeth, then through the corresponding features alignment and the surface interpolation deformation, the prosthetic tooth surface deformation is realized. The result of case study of the first molar in lower jaw shows that the design process is simple, the standard tooth surface deformation is reasonable, the surface distortion can be avoided and the final inlay surface matches well with the preparation tooth. The feature mapping design method provides a new way for clinic application in dental CAD.

Key words: Feature mapping, Prosthetic teeth, Radial basis function, Surface deformation