Delcam offers head to toe CADCAM solutions at MEDTEC France

Delcam France will show its latest CADCAM solutions for the dental and orthotics industries at the MEDTEC France exhibition to be held in Besancon on 22nd and 23rd April. As well as demonstrating these customised solutions, the company will also show how its range of design, reverse engineering, machining and inspection software can be used to reduce costs and improve patient outcomes across many other areas of the medical industry.

For the dental industry, Delcam offers DentCAD, for the fast, reliable creation of dental restorations, including copings, crowns and bridge frameworks, and DentMILL, a knowledge-based machining system for the manufacture of components.

While the two programs can be used together to provide a complete design and manufacturing system, both DentCAD and DentMILL are completely ‘open’ and so can be used with software and hardware from other companies. For example, DentCAD accepts data from any scanner capable of exporting data in the STL format used widely within the dental industry. Similarly, DentMILL can output machining toolpaths to virtually any CNC machine.

The key benefit of both programs is that they are extremely easy to use and so are ideally suited both for dental technicians with existing CAD knowledge and those that have no previous experience of computer-aided design. The whole process is based on a series of "Wizards” that guide the user through the entire design and manufacturing process.

A wide range of visualisation and analysis tools are available at every stage, including sectioning, measuring, shading and transparency options that allow detailed inspection of the shape being developed. This ensures that the results are exactly those required by the patient.

All the functionality in DentMILL is based on Delcam’s PowerMILL CAM system, which is widely acknowledged to be the world leader in high-speed and five-axis machining. This allows the software to offer a far wider range of proven machining strategies than is available in other dental CAM programs. The latest additions to the software are new five-axis options. These strategies are particularly important for abutment manufacture as these components are difficult to produce with three-axis machining. The five-axis functionality can reduce material wastage when producing copings and bridges, and can also be used to machine parts containing undercuts.

Delcam also offers equivalent programs for the design and manufacture of orthotic insoles, OrthoModel and OrthoMill, respectively. The combined programs provide a complete solution for the production of high-quality insoles for both the comfort and medical markets. Again, the entire process is driven by a series of easy-to-use menus, which incorporate the terminology used by the industry to describe the various features of the orthotic. This makes it easy for medical and footwear professionals to use, even those having no previous CADCAM experience.

Although many customers are expected to use both OrthoModel and OrthoMill, the two programs are also completely "open”. OrthoModel can take data from any scanning system or use manual measurements, while OrthoMill can take models from most CAD systems and output machining instructions to any milling machine.

The latest additions to the program include a new method for creating "foot-positive” models. This allows patterns to be designed directly from scan data taken from the patient’s foot to create foot orthotics in a variety of materials, including carbon fibre.

A new "cast-dressing” option allows the user to apply corrections directly on the scan of a patient’s foot when designing orthotics. This process duplicates on the computer the modifications made to the cast by adding or subtracting plaster using traditional methods. In a related development, the scan and the orthotic can now be overlaid and viewed together, so that the extent of the changes can be seen easily.

Using OrthoModel and OrthoMill reduces the time needed to prepare orthotics so giving the faster turn-around times that customers demand. In addition, the use of computer-based design and manufacturing techniques brings the benefits of accuracy and quality to the orthotics industry that are already enjoyed by other areas of footwear manufacture.