Oral Health and Dental Management

Magnetic resonance imaging – a suitable method to evaluate osseointegration of dental PEEK implants

3^rd Euro Congress and Expo on Dental & Oral Health

June 16-18, 2015 Alicante, Spain

Cindy Elschner1, Paula Korn2, Matthias C Schulz2, Ursula Range3, Ronald Mai2 and Ulrich Scheler1

Posters-Accepted Abstracts: Oral Health Dent Manag

Abstract:

Evaluating the osseointegration of new biomaterials is critical for the understanding of tissue-implant-interactions. Currently, the investigation of any novel implant commonly relies on histological examination, which is destructive, time-consuming and does not permit longitudinal studies. Consequently, a large number of animals are required for preclinical studies and the results are affected by a wide biological variance. Thus, the application of non-destructive imaging is of crucial interest in biomaterial research. We examined the suitability of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) for assessingthe osseous healingofa dental implant. The aim of our study was to evaluate, how far MRI would be able to complement the information by traditional histology and which additional information could be accessible with multimodal imaging.Therefore, model implants fabricated of titanium coated polyetheretherketone (Ti/PEEK) were inserted in the mandible of minipigs. The peri-implant bone formation was evaluated in different peri-implant regions after two, four and eight weeks ex vivo by MRI and histology. Our findings show that MRI and histology ledto comparable results with no statistical differences regarding the assessed parameters. MRI was well suited for monitoring and analysing the osseous healing of the Ti/PEEK implant with high resolution, and MRI providedthe opportunity to differentiate between apparent tissues. Furthermore, we could demonstrate that the examined regions showed obvious different bone formation. Finally, Ti/PEEK implants coated with titanium led to sufficient osseointegration.