Abstract:
Root canal treatment (also called „endodontics') is needed when the blood or nerve supply of the tooth (called the „pulp') is infected through decay or injury. Initially, there is a pain in the early stages of the infection. In some cases tooth may get darken in colour, which mean that the nerve of the tooth has died. The procedure used to recover this, is root canal treatment. Half of the world‟s population suffers from dental problems. In modern endodontic treatments, the emphasis is placed far more on cleaning than preparing the root canal system and filling procedures. This does not mean that root canal obturation is less important. Root canal procedure (RCT) is one of the most significant treatments which work for tooth prevention when no other treatment works. However after RCT, tooth may become vulnerable to decay.
It is extensively studied that tooth becomes weaker after root canal treatment, but still this topic is controversial. Life of root canal treated tooth is compromised as compared to healthy tooth in general.
Therefore in this research, we have conducted some experiments using imaged based modeling with Finite Elements to investigate stress analysis in the healthy vs. treated tooth (RCT). It is found out that the stress maps obtained from a treated tooth shows significantly higher stresses compared to the healthy tooth whereas the displacements calculated for healthy tooth are higher compared to the treated tooth. This pertains to the value of elastic modulus used for the treated tooth which is knowingly much higher than the healthy tooth. We have also conducted mathematical modeling for this study in order to validate simulated results. The percentage error is very low between the analytical (mathematical) vs. simulated results, which means our results hold true for this particular study.
