Enhancing glass ionomer cement features by using the HA/YSZ nanocomposite: a feed forward neural network modelling.

Despite brilliant properties of glass ionomer cement (GIC), its weak mechanical property poses an obstacle for its use in medical applications. The present research aims to formulate hydroxyapatite/yttria-stabilized zirconia (HA/YSZ) in the composition of GIC to enhance mechanical properties and to improve fluoride release of GIC. HA/YSZ was synthesized via a sol-gel method and characterized by applying X-ray diffraction (XRD), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR), X-ray photo-emission spectroscopy (XPS) and simultaneous thermal analysis (STA) along with transmission electron microscopy (TEM) methods. The synthesized nanocomposite was mixed with GIC at a fixed composition of 5wt%. The effect of different weight percentages of YSZ:HA on GIC was investigated by measuring the compressive strength, diametral tensile strength, microhardness and fluoride release. The results showed that, after 1 and 7 days of setting, the 20wt% nanohydroxyapatite/80wt% stabilized zirconia cement exhibited higher compressive strength (1857-245MPa), higher diametral tensile strength (11-14MPa) and greater microhardness (104-106MPa) as compared with the pure GIC (65-88MPa in compressive strength, 5-9.5MPa in diametral tensile strength and 70-89MPa in microhardness). The reinforced cement, also, exhibited higher fluoride release compared with pure GIC. The artificial neural network (ANN) was trained for modeling the system. Results obtained by ANN have proved to be completely in accordance with expectations.