The project

ICB Dent - a project in the frame of the
Leonardo da Vinci programme

The ICB-Dent project, coordinated by K. U. Leuven, contributes to the realisation of the 3rd objective of the Leonardo da Vinci programme, namely to "To promote and reinforce the contribution of vocational training to the process of innovation, with a view to improving competitiveness and entrepreneurship, also in view of new employment possibilities". It responds to the priority "to encourage cooperation at all levels between vocational training bodies, and companies, in particular SMEs and the social partners, in order to improve the relevance and effectiveness of training", it promotes life long learning and contributes to "exploiting the potential of information and communication technologies (ICT)".

The target group consists of professionals mainly in the SMEs active in the market of dental devices, or with a plan to convert part of their activities into this market. Clinicians, graduate and undergraduate students may also find relevant course material in this website. The availability of the course material through a website will allow also people at a disadvantage in the labour market to have access to the training material.

The partners involved in this project are:

Certain specific tasks are subcontracted.

During the development of the project, the partners foresee to produce a new vocational training path with models that explain and show the different approaches to the problem of biomedical devices, in particular referring to dental prosthetic devices. This multi-disciplinary approach will involve aspect of bio-materials and bio-compatibility, interaction between bone and devices, clinical implications, manufacturing and also support for market analysis.
The end result of the project will be a website containing course material in the area of implant and prosthetic dentistry. At this moment, the following chapters are foreseen in this web-site, although fine tuning may occur during the first work package of this project:

This kind of integrated approach is adequate for all final users of the project because they can find in these notions the possibility for improving their knowledge, by acquiring new competencies from other fields. Co-operation between educational, industrial and professional areas represents a basic task of this project.
Computer simulations will be an integral part of the course material. The users will be able to perform what-if simulations in an interactive way e.g. to evaluate the effect of oral implant placement or the number of implants, or to evaluate the effect of choosing one or another material for the dental prosthesis. Simple, but clinically relevant configurations will be implemented that illustrate the importance of an appropriate prosthetic restoration for the load transfer to the implants and bone. Due to this simplicity it will be possible to run the simulations on-line without the need for considerable computer power or complex numerical algorithms to perform the simulations. In this way the user group will not be limited because of demands on computer infrastructture. Also it will render implementation much easier.

The language of the website and the training material is English. Because of the focus on professionals and people with a higher level of education, and the acceptance of English as an international standard scientific and professional language, this will not pose a problem. It is foreseen that the introductory part of the website (aimed at the large public) will be translated into the major languages of the European Union.