Abstract

Introduction: Piezosurgery device is one of the most commonly used instrument on the intraoral surgery such as maxillary sinus lift and autogeneous bone graft. Piezosurgery instrument also contains the tips that are manufactured especially for the convenient bone graft, which now many surgeons apply them for collecting bone graft materials in the curettage method for the restoration of skull defects. However, objective data has not been shown concerning the effects about bone graft with using Piezosurgery. Therefore we investigated the effects of Piezosurgery on the rabbit-skull defect healing. Materials & Methods: To investigate the regeneration of the bony defect with various bone graft, 10 adult New Zealand white rabbits (average weight : 2.8 ± 0.3kg, about 12weeks) were used. The four circular bony defects measuring 6mm in diameter were made with Piezosurgery device on each rabbit cranial bone. The harvested bone tissues during defect formation were also used for autogeneous bone graft. They were grafted into the defects in a various type; block type (Group 1), particulated type by the bone mill (Group 2), chopped type by curette shaped Piezosurgery tip (Group 3), the defect without any graft was served as control (control group). The animals were sacrificed after 6 weeks and bone regeneration capacity was evaluated histomorphometrically. Result & Conclusion: Autogeneous bone graft harvested using a Piezosurgery instrument showed satisfactory bone regeneration. There was no conspicuous difference bone prepared amomg by bone mill or Piezosurgery and block bone graft. Therefore, the bone harvested from the intraoral site near the operation field using the piezosurgery device can be a feasible and reliable graft for intraoral bony defects.