**1. Introduction**

Dental implant supported prosthetic rehabilitation has become a widely used treatment option in partial and completely edentulous patients as recent advances occur in materials and techniques. Hard and soft tissue defects are usually present in these edentulous patients due to a variety of traumatic events such as periodontal diseases, oncologic pathologies and tooth loss. Ridge augmentation procedures may be necessary before or during the implant surgery to overcome the challenges arising from bony defects and achieve ideal implant positioning with predictable treatment outcomes (**Figure 1**).

#### **Figure 1.**

*Loss of anterior teeth resulting with severe loss of alveolar bone. Bone volume should be restored for the proper restoration of the lost teeth.*

A large variety of bone augmentation techniques can be applied in the presence of bone defects. Guided bone regeneration, ridge splitting, distraction osteogenesis, maxillary sinus lifting and autogenous onlay block bone grafting are main techniques which have successful outcomes in reconstruction of bone defects. This chapter reviews alveolar ridge augmentation techniques in brief [1–4].

Defect morphology plays a critical role when choosing the type of augmentation procedure to perform. Number of surrounding bony walls are important when an augmentation is planned, because vascularization and healing properties are provided by these walls to the augmentation site. Therefore, defects with less amount of remaining bony walls are considered to be complex [5, 6].
