GIMP — Medical Plugins for Dental Imaging GIMP is best known as a free and open-source image editor, often compared to Photoshop. With medical plugins, however, it can be adapted for use in healthcare, including dental imaging. Dentists and researchers sometimes use GIMP to enhance X-rays, annotate CBCT slices, or prepare images for teaching and reporting. Because it is lightweight and runs on almost any workstation, GIMP with plugins is often found in universities and clinics as a cost-free sol

CloudCompare — Point Cloud and Mesh Analysis in Dental Workflows CloudCompare is an open-source 3D point cloud and mesh processing tool. While it was originally created for geospatial data and engineering, it has also found a place in dental research and labs. Its strength lies in comparing 3D datasets — for example, checking changes in dental scans over time, aligning different scans of the same patient, or analyzing precision of 3D printed models against original CBCT or intraoral data. Unlike

MeshLab — Everyday Tool for Cleaning Dental 3D Scans MeshLab is one of those small but essential programs you often see in digital dentistry labs. It’s open-source, free, and focused on a single task: fixing and preparing 3D meshes. Scanners don’t always produce perfect files — sometimes there are holes, rough edges, or extra noise in the geometry. MeshLab lets technicians smooth, repair, and simplify those files so they’re ready for CAD software or 3D printing. It doesn’t try to be a full CAD s

Blender — 3D Modeling with Dental Add-ons Blender is best known in the world of animation and 3D design, but with the right add-ons it has also found its way into dental workflows. Thanks to plugins like Blender for Dental and other community tools, labs and clinics can use it to model prosthetics, aligners, and surgical guides. Its strong point is visualization — Blender handles meshes and rendering at a level beyond most dental-specific CAD tools. Because it’s free and open-source, it is widel

FreeCAD — Dental Workbench in Everyday Use FreeCAD by itself is a general CAD program, but with the Dental Workbench add-on it turns into something much closer to dental CAD/CAM. The main idea is simple: load a scan from an intraoral scanner or CBCT, align it, model a crown or surgical guide, and export the result to STL for printing. It doesn’t try to compete head-to-head with commercial software like Exocad, but in universities and smaller labs it has its niche. Many teams use it as a teaching

Краткое описание программы LibreCAD (Dental use)