Oral Exostoses and Congruence of the Contact in the Temporo-Mandibular Joint

The paper introduces a case study of a buccal maxillary exostosis of a female patient and the application of the contact congruence evaluation, based on the Winkler contact model. The 3D reconstruction of the patient’s cranial bones was extracted from 2D computerized tomography (CT) data and it was analyzed by a proper software. A contact congruence evaluation based on the Winkler contact model was performed, and the theory was correlated with the mechanical contact and the distribution of loads with geometrical indentations of the joint members. The aim of this paper was to correlate the presence of exostoses with contact dysfunctions evaluated by congruence measurements.