Method and system for providing dynamic orthodontic assessment and treatment profiles

#The present application claims priority under 35 USC §120 to pending application Ser. No. 10/788,635 entitled “Dental Data Mining” filed on Feb. 27, 2004, and to application Ser. No. 11/379,198 entitled “Method and System for Providing Indexing and Cataloguing of Orthodontic Related Treatment Profiles and Options” filed Apr. 18, 2006, the disclosure of each of which are incorporated herein by reference for all purposes.

#The present invention is related generally to the field of orthodontics. More specifically, the present invention is related to methods and system for providing dynamic orthodontic assessment and treatment profiles.

#A primary objective of orthodontics is to realign patients' teeth to positions where the teeth function optimally and have an aesthetic appearance. The goal of a doctor is to take the patient from their current condition (“initial” or “starting dentition”) to a final condition (“treatment goal”). The result achieved is known as the “treatment outcome.” There may be many ways to achieve the goal and these are known as “treatment options.” The methodologies used by the doctor to get the patient to the goal are the known as the “treatment plan.”

#FIG. 1A shows one exemplary dental data mining system;

#FIG. 1B shows an analysis of the performance of one or more dental appliances;

#FIG. 1C shows various Movement Type data used in one embodiment of the data mining system;

#Digital treatment plans are now possible with 3-dimensional orthodontic treatment planning tools such as ClinCheck®. from Align Technology, Inc. or other software available from eModels and OrthoCAD, among others. These technologies allow the clinician to use the actual patient's dentition as a starting point for customizing the treatment plan. The ClinCheck®. technology uses a patient-specific digital model to plot a treatment plan, and then use a scan of the achieved treatment outcome to assess the degree of success of the outcome as compared to the original digital treatment plan as discussed in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/640,439, filed Aug. 21, 2003 and U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/225,889 filed Aug. 22, 2002. The problem with the digital treatment plan and outcome assessment is the abundance of data and the lack of standards and efficient methodology by which to assess “treatment success” at an individual patient level. To analyze the information, a dental data mining system is used.

#FIG. 1A shows one exemplary dental data mining system. In this system, dental treatment and outcome data sets 1 are stored in a database or information warehouse 2. The data is extracted by data mining software 3 that generates results 4. The data mining software can interrogate the information captured and/or updated in the database 2 and can generate an output data stream correlating a patient tooth problem with a dental appliance solution. Note that the output of the data mining software can be most advantageously, self-reflexively, fed as a subsequent input to at least the database and the data mining correlation algorithm.

#The result of the data mining system of FIG. 1A is used for defining appliance configurations or changes to appliance configurations for incrementally moving teeth. The tooth movements will be those normally associated with orthodontic treatment, including translation in all three orthogonal directions, rotation of the tooth centerline in the two orthogonal directions with rotational axes perpendicular to a vertical centerline (“root angulation” and “torque”), as well as rotation of the tooth centerline in the orthodontic direction with an axis parallel to the vertical centerline (“pure rotation”).