Clinical evaluation of the effects of cutting off, overlapping, and rescanning procedures on intraoral scanning accuracy.

Statement Of Problem: Cutting off and rescanning procedures have been shown to affect the accuracy of intraoral scanning; however, the clinical impact of tooth cutting off and rescanning of mesh holes on accuracy remains unclear.

Purpose: The purpose of this clinical study was to evaluate the influence of the tooth location of the rescanned mesh holes (with or without modifying the preexisting intraoral digital mesh with the rescanning procedures) on intraoral scanning accuracy.

Material And Methods: A maxillary right quadrant digital scan was acquired (control scan) on a dentate participant by using an intraoral scanner (TRIOS 4). The control scan was duplicated 240 times and distributed among 4 groups depending on the location of the rescanned mesh hole: first molar (M group), second premolar (PM group), canine (C group), and central incisor (I group). Each group was divided into 2 subgroups: one subgroup contained overlapping rescanning modifications (WO subgroup), and the other blocked the preexisting digital scan to avoid further modifications when rescanning (NO subgroup) (n=30). A software program (Geomagic) was used to assess the discrepancy between the control and the experimental meshes by using the root mean square (RMS) error calculation. The Shapiro-Wilk test showed that data were not normally distributed. The Kruskal-Wallis test and post hoc Dunn test with Bonferroni correction were used to analyze the RMS mean discrepancies (α=.05). The Levene test was used to analyze the equality of the variances.

Results: Trueness ranged from 15 to 17 μm with a precision of 4 μm among the subgroups in which the existing digital scan was blocked, but the trueness ranged from 42 to 72 μm and the precision ranged from 15 to 47 μm among the subgroups in which the rescanning procedures allowed the modification of the existing digital scan. Significant trueness differences were found among the groups tested (P<.05). Significant differences in the RMS values were computed between the WO and NO subgroups for each group (M (P<.001): PM (P<.001); C (P<.001), and I (P<.001) groups), but the effect of the tooth mesh hole location demonstrated no significant difference either among the WO (P>.999) or NO subgroups (P>.999). Furthermore, the NO groups showed markedly better precision than the WO groups for each tooth location. The I-WO group showed better precision than the groups C-WO, PM-WO, and M-WO. However, when no overlapping was allowed, no difference was found in precision between the different tooth locations tested.

Conclusions: Rescanning procedures influenced intraoral scanning accuracy. Allowing further modification of the preexisting intraoral digital scan demonstrated a significantly decreased scanning accuracy. However, tooth location of the rescanned mesh hole did not impact scanning accuracy.