The potential of additive manufacturing to produce optimised and customized polymeric parts is often impaired by poor surface finish, low mechanical properties, and insufficient dimensional accuracy. Post-processing treatments are usually adopted to address these issues. Scientific community and industrial actors are engaged in the development and use of post-processing to enhance the performance and widen the range of application of polymeric components manufactured by additive technologies. The present work aims to provide an exhaustive classification and discussion of the post-processing treatments, as well as an extensive literature review of the approaches proposed within the scientific community. A holistic view of post-processing is provided, including a discussion of the benefits associated with each technique as well as its side effects. This work is intended to support the selection of the most appropriate post-processing by considering multiple aspects such as the material, part geometry, processing time, costs, and treatment specificity.

Transparent and removable aligners represent an effective solution to correct various orthodontic malocclusions through minimally invasive procedures. An aligner‐based treatment requires patients to sequentially wear dentition‐mating shells obtained by thermoforming polymeric disks on reference dental models. An aligner is shaped introducing a geometrical mismatch with respect to the actual tooth positions to induce a loading system, which moves the target teeth toward the correct positions. The common practice is based on selecting the aligner features (material, thickness, and auxiliary elements) by only considering clinician's subjective assessments.In this article, a computational design and engineering methodology has been developed to reconstruct anatomical tissues, to model parametric aligner shapes, to simulate orthodontic movements, and to enhance the aligner design. The proposed approach integrates computer‐aided technologies, from tomographic imaging to optical scanning, from parametric modeling to finite element analyses, within a 3‐dimensional digital framework.The anatomical modeling provides anatomies, including teeth (roots and crowns), jaw bones, and periodontal ligaments, which are the references for the down streaming parametric aligner shaping. The biomechanical interactions between anatomical models and aligner geometries are virtually reproduced using a finite element analysis software. The methodology allows numerical simulations of patient‐specific conditions and the comparative analyses of different aligner configurations.In this article, the digital framework has been used to study the influence of various auxiliary elements on the loading system delivered to a maxillary and a mandibular central incisor during an orthodontic tipping movement. Numerical simulations have shown a high dependency of the orthodontic tooth movement on the auxiliary element configuration, which should then be accurately selected to maximize the aligner's effectiveness.

Summary: Dedicated imaging methods are among the most important tools of modern computer‐aided medical applications. In the last few years, cone beam computed tomography (CBCT) has gained popularity in digital dentistry for 3D imaging of jawbones and teeth. However, the anatomy of a maxillofacial region complicates the assessment of tooth geometry and anatomical location when using standard orthogonal views of the CT data set. In particular, a tooth is defined by a sub‐region, which cannot be easily separated from surrounding tissues by only considering pixel grey‐intensity values. For this reason, an image enhancement is usually necessary in order to properly segment tooth geometries.In this paper, an anatomy‐driven methodology to reconstruct individual 3D tooth anatomies by processing CBCT data is presented. The main concept is to generate a small set of multi‐planar reformation images along significant views for each target tooth, driven by the individual anatomical geometry of a specific patient. The reformation images greatly enhance the clearness of the target tooth contours. A set of meaningful 2D tooth contours is extracted and used to automatically model the overall 3D tooth shape through a B‐spline representation.The effectiveness of the methodology has been verified by comparing some anatomy‐driven reconstructions of anterior and premolar teeth with those obtained by using standard tooth segmentation tools. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.