Auto Bracket Removal Edge Cases

The below are some guidelines and tips that can help you understand how our AI works with bracket removal cases including what works, what might cause issues and how to mitigate this.

What works well

ABR works well on arches with brackets only, with minimal artifacts, high triangle count, and healthy gums:

Issues you might find

Our AI smooths out margins

On brackets that intersect the gums, the margin will often be smoothed (see below). If needed for your dental appliance, the margin can be easily touched up in post processing with 3rd party tools.

Be aware of scan quality

Scan quality also affects bracket removal. If there is a significant amount of occlusion, it is harder for ABR to generate smooth surfaces.

In the following example, there are “shadows” caused by the wire adding excess material between the teeth which is difficult to remove. These scans will need to be rescanned and uploaded for reprocessing if not clear.

Missing teeth

Too many teeth missing in a single arch can sometimes fail our initial quality check and return an error or can sometimes make it through processing with some minor touch-ups required.

Attachments & brackets

  1. We can remove large attachments, but smaller attachments are often not touched by our removal algorithm.
  2. DamonQ brackets or other large brackets can be difficult to remove since less of the original tooth is scanned. This can lead to excess material that needs to be touched up or overly smoothed gingival margins.
  3. For the below specific case, there is some excess bracket material left on the scan due to shadowing from the brackets. You can see how extra material is scanned as follows. This is a common issue, and most users have a quick post-processing step to quickly smooth out any excess bracket material left. This is also solvable by improving the quality of the input scan by preventing shadowing.

We do highly recommend a manual inspection and quick touch up after ABR in most cases. Our goal here is to save 95% of the work & time required for manual bracket removal. For this issue in particular though, we have seen it quite often and have a fix in the works already to improve the AI to be more consistent with cases like these. 

Files that are pre-based

Files with pre-existing bases are usually very inconsistent, so we cannot guarantee the quality of a file with a pre-existing base. Especially if it leaves minimal space between the gingival margin and the beginning of the base, processed results from the AI might end up visually unappealing.

Additional issues

We understand that there are other issues that can go wrong, so our team at Dental Axess is always available to assist you when things go wrong. Please feel free to reach out to us.

We understand that there are other issues that can go wrong, so our team at Dental Axess is always available to assist you when things go wrong. Please feel free to reach out to us.