Abstract: From walking sticks to bionic arms, people have always augmented their bodies with supplementary or replacement parts to improve their function, comfort or aesthetics. For optimal efficiency, these must be personalized to precisely fit the body, and their design requires significant knowledge and skills on anatomy and mechanics. The Orthotics and Prosthetics (O&P) domain has developed a large body of know-how to replicate body parts using plaster, design and sculpt shapes, and mold corresponding devices. This is applied to various body parts such as teeth, limbs, ears. Unfortunately, these techniques are empirical and operator-dependent. To improve precision, O&P increasingly uses digital imaging and design software. However, most of the current software essentially consist of digital sculpting toolboxes, therefore the design process remains virtually as empirical and operator-dependent as before.

In this talk, we present Anatoscope’s approach to tackle the challenge of precision in O&P. To really improve on Computer Assisted Design for O&P, we need to map the skills of good practitioners to numerical methods implemented in computers. Knowledge can be formulated using models and algorithmes, while some skills are easily expressed as rules, and others are more easily described using examples. Our artificial intelligence combines these paradigms through constrained optimizations solved using various strategies. We illustrate these using various examples of dental and orthopedic design.

Bio: François Faure, graduated in Mechanical Engineering at ENS Cachan in 1993, and became a full university professor in Computer Science in Grenoble, 2011. His research contributions range from the simulation of rigid and deformable solids, collision detection, to the computation of personalized models for medical simulation. He founded Anatoscope with four colleagues in 2015, and he has been fully focused on its development since then. In three years the company has signed strategic partnerships in the dental and orthopedic domains, and grown to 40 employees.