23rd American World Dentistry Congress

3D Printing (3DP), otherwise known as additive manufacturing is the forerunner in today’s digital dentistry. 3DP as a technique surfaced back in the 1980s but has turned mainstream only since lean methodologies entered prototyping more recently in the 21st century. Its advent began when Charles Hull printed, for the first time, in 1983, a three-dimensional object using the first 3D printer. 3DP is a process of producing 3D solid objects from a digital file in STL format (Surface tesselation language file or Standard triangulation language file) by a 3D printer by joining, bonding, sintering or polymerizing small volume elements. As evident in the Gartner Hype Cycles for 2017, 3DP is making critical inroads today in dentistry driven primarily by its superior customization propensity