LightForce Orthodontics reduced dental brace design time by 60 percent with nTop

About: LightForce Orthodontics is a dental device design and manufacturing company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They serve orthodontists across North America by designing and manufacturing 3D-printed orthodontic treatment devices. Their mission is to revolutionize dentistry with patient-specific dental braces.

• Industry: Medical devices
• Size: 400 employees
• Location: Massachusetts, USA
• Product: Fully-custom 3D-printed dental braces

Eighty-five percent of orthodontic patients need wire braces to straighten their teeth. To hold the wire, dentists or orthodontists need to attach brackets (small, square handles) to the front of the teeth. Installing each bracket by hand takes a long time and often results in immense patient discomfort.

LightForce wanted to provide custom-designed, 3D printed orthodontic treatments to help eliminate the challenges of manual bonding and shorten the treatment times. The idea was to create a portal that would provide a fully digital workflow so orthodontists could design custom treatment solutions for their patients.

LightForce had to overcome several challenges related to the design software. These included the time it takes to design the brackets manually, the inability of legacy CAD software to track the progress of a multi-step design process, and the difficulty of training new users on the software.

Automate the design process

Previously, LightForce engineers had to manually optimize each design, but nTop Automate makes manual operations in the design workflow unnecessary. nTop Automate enables you to run nTop workflows in a headless, programmatic environment using scripts. Such automated processes have now helped the engineers of LightForce to fully automate the design step and reduce the design and validation time to a mere 10 minutes.

Track and reuse design workflows

nTop provides visibility into each step of the design workflow, allowing users to track the design parameters they used in different iterations of the process. It further provides its users the opportunity to identify errors at any stage and reuse previously designed workflows. Error handling and reusable workflows ensure that LightForce engineers do not have to waste their time performing endless repetitive tasks. Instead, they can focus on performing focused reiterations and optimization to yield failure-proof product designs.

Simplify training and onboarding

The prescriptive and intuitive nature of nTop makes it possible for inexperienced team members to swiftly pick up the nuances of the software and use it to its full potential. Its reusable workflows further make it trainee-friendly, allowing any technician to reuse a workflow that someone else designed. Thus, LightForce was able to quickly train its staff to use nTop to the company’s benefit.