Advanced Technologies for Oral and Craniomaxillofacial Therapy

Oral and craniomaxillofacial health issues and treatments span the entire life cycle, from congenital deformities and maldevelopment, to acquired caries and periodontal disease, raising tremendous clinical requirements for regeneration and restoration of soft and hard tissues in the craniomaxillofacial region and dental dentition. During oral and craniomaxillofacial-related clinical therapies, many clinical problems cannot be solved solely by existing medical technologies, such as the lack of anti-bacterial, anti-fouling and abrasion resistant properties in prosthetic or orthodontic materials, insufficient bioactivity of maxillofacial bone repair materials and inability of existing materials to deal with concurrent individual problems (infection, inflammation, aging, osteoporosis, etc.), the lack of biomechanical control in the process of dental prosthetics and orthodontics resulting in unexpected failure, bone resorption, complications and side effects, etc. With the development of material science, bioscience, digitalization and artificial intelligence, more and more interdisciplinary technologies have been applied in oral and craniomaxillofacial clinical therapy to solve the above issues, and further improve therapeutic procedures, outcomes and efficiencies.

This Research Topic aims at the application of interdisciplinary technologies including material science, bioscience, digitalization and artificial intelligence, etc., in oral and cranio-maxillofacial clinical therapy, to improve therapeutic procedures, outcomes and efficiencies. Advances in this area include but not limited to, novel self-healing or anti-bacterial dental resin, design of immunoregulatory regenerative scaffolds for bone/periodontal regeneration, mechanical simulation analyses novel orthodontic/prosthedontic designs, etc.

This Research Topic aims to report the advanced interdisciplinary technologies for current oral and craniomaxillofacial-related clinical therapy improvement. Both original research articles and review articles are welcomed. Following are more specific directions of this Research Topic:
•Design of biomaterials capable of interacting with micro-environment of periodontal or craniomaxillofacial tissue including bone, mucosa, endodontium;
•Design of dental materials with anti-bacterial, anti-fouling, abrasion resistant, or self-healing capacities;
•Modification of dental materials or regenerative scaffolds with novel agents/drugs/factors against infection, inflammation, aging, osteoporosis, etc.;
•Applications of biomolecules like peptides, proteins, etc. for improved biological integration of dental materials；
•Mechanism investigation of oral and cranio-maxillofacial clinical phenomena including cellular and molecular pathways, mechanical simulation analyses;
•Improvement of oral and cranio-maxillofacial clinical therapeutic procedure, outcome and efficiency via bioscience / digitalization / artificial intelligence technologies.