[A clinical application of the T-Scan II system--usefulness for evaluating occlusal contacts of complete denture wearers].

The purpose of this study was to assess the reproducibility of the T-Scan II system and its clinical usefulness for evaluating occlusal contacts of complete denture wearers. The occlusal contacts of 13 dentate subjects, and 14 complete denture wearers, were recorded using a T-Scan II system during maximum voluntary clenching. The recordings for complete denture wearers were taken after each treatment for the new denture, and continued until the completion of all corrections. The recordings for complete denture wearers were analyzed using repeated measured ANOVA. In addition, the variables obtained with the system, the delta of the occlusal area and load, and the maximum-load time (MLT), which represented the time length taken to reach the occlusal load at the maximum level, were then compared between dentate subjects and complete denture wearers, using a t-test. The conclusions were as follows: 1. The standard errors values for both occlusal area and the load recordings for the dentate subjects were limited to within 10% of the means. 2. The values of the occlusal area and load significantly increased, and delta of the occlusal area and load significantly decreased, as the denture corrections were repeated. 3. The means of the MLT were about 0.3 seconds for dentate subjects, and 0.8 seconds for complete denture subjects. It was revealed that the T-Scan II showed acceptable reproducibility, and it was useful to evaluate occlusal contacts of complete denture wearers.