Finite element analysis (FEA) has been applied to investigate dental implant designs, the structure and material of the superstructure, and the stability of the surrounding bone [1, 2]. According to PubMed, only 10 FEA studies of dental implants were published in 1990, while 102 papers were published in 2014.

FEA has become an increasingly useful tool in the past few decades. In the medical field, the behavior of any structure or tissue under a particular stimulation can be evaluated using FEA, and biomechanical changes in the tissues can be analyzed. Additionally, FEA allows for measurement of the stress distribution inside of the bone and various dental implant designs during mastication; such measurements are impossible to perform in vivo [1, 2, 3].

A large number of FEA regarding dental implant and bone were published in these decades; however, the precision and accuracy of those studies in silico are still questionable. In 2009, Dumont et al. [4] indicated that FEA studies of biological structures should be validated experimentally whenever possible. Hannam [5] stated that the minimum requirements of FEA studies should include comparisons with data from other work or any data that can be gleaned from the living subjects being modeled.

According to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers Committee on verification and validation in computational solid mechanics, verification is defined as “the process of determining that a computational model accurately represents the underlying mathematical model and its solution,” while validation is defined as “the process of determining the degree to which a model is an accurate representation of the real world from the perspective of the intended uses of the model.” In simple terms, verification is the process of “solving the equations right,” whereas validation is the process of “solving the right equations” [6,7,8,9]. Validation is a process by which computational predictions are compared with experimental data in an effort to assess the modeling error [6,7,8,9]. The sole purpose of these “experiments” is to produce data for comparison with model predictions rather than to address specific scientific hypotheses.