Highly Nonlinear Solitary Waves for the Assessment of Dental Implant Mobility.

In this paper we present a noninvasive technique based on the propagation of highly nonlinear solitary waves (HNSWs) to monitor the stability of dental implants. HNSWs are nondispersive mechanical waves that can form and travel in highly nonlinear systems, such as one-dimensional chains of spherical particles. The technique is based on the hypothesis that the mobility of a dental implant affects certain characteristics of the HNSWs reflected at the interface between a crystal-based transducer and the implant.