Development of a decision support system to use in the strategic purchasing of dental implants

In this study, a decision support system (DSS) based on the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) method was developed using MATLAB to select the best dental implant alternative. The first step involved conducting interviews with experts to identify the criteria for TOPSIS. In the second step, a database was structured for each dental implant brand distributed in the market for the last five years. In the third step, MATLAB code and Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) were created to execute TOPSIS. The user can also display the other four options with a graph on the GUI, including the ranking scores (C_i^*) for each option. The DSS was applied in two case studies. The MATLAB-based DSS tool has a compact, user-friendly interface, making it easy to adopt in implant selection decisions. The proposed DSS can be widely used in different applications in dental implant selection tasks.