Introduction: Various prefabricated maxillofacial implants are used in the clinical routine for the surgical treatment of patients. In addition to these prefabricated implants, customized CAD/CAM implants become increasingly important for a more precise replacement of damaged anatomical structures. This paper reviews the design and manufacturing of patient-specific implants for the maxillofacial area. Areas covered: The contribution of this publication is to give a state-of-the-art overview in the usage of customized facial implants. Moreover, it provides future perspectives, including 3D printing technologies, for the manufacturing of patient-individual facial implants that are based on patient's data acquisitions, like Computed Tomography (CT) or Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). Expert opinion: The main target of this review is to present various designing software and 3D manufacturing technologies that have been applied to fabricate facial implants. In doing so, different CAD designing software's are discussed, which are based on various methods and have been implemented and evaluated by researchers. Finally, recent 3D printing technologies that have been applied to manufacture patient-individual implants will be introduced and discussed.

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Background The patient‐specific templates for osteotomy often have complex surface features. Using current commercial software to design such templates is quite complicated, tedious and unrepeatable. Aims In this study, a novel surgical planning system for oral and maxillofacial surgery named EasyTemplate is developed, aiming to help doctors shorten the modelling time and assure the reliability in template design. Materials & Methods In the simplified design process of an osteotomy guide, the main template can be formed efficiently using a surface offsetting algorithm, which is based on isosurface extraction and oriented bounding box. Thereafter, the cutting grooves can be generated automatically. Results A complicated surgical guide could be built accurately in about 10 min. Clinical orthognathic cases were conducted successfully using osteotomy and repositioning templates designed by EasyTemplate. Discussion Compared with commercially available softwares, higher efficiency and simpler design process were achieved, moreover, the time cost is one‐third or even less. Conclusion EasyTemplate can be a useful alternative to traditional softwares. This software allows the auto‐generation algorithm which helps avoid a tedious modeling process while providing basic shapes for designers.

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The porous structure of the implant contributes significantly to prosthetic osseointegration in cranio-maxillofacial defect repair surgeries. This study establishes a system called EasyImplant that can easily and efficiently design customized craniomaxillofacial implant with porous structure. Healthy side of the skull model is used to obtain the initial implant model on defective side by mirroring method. According to