Comparison between stereophotogrammetric, digital, and conventional impression techniques in implant-supported fixed complete arch prostheses: An in vitro study

Statement of problem. Conventional impressions and digital intraoral scanning for implant-supported fixed complete arch prostheses still have many problems that influence accuracy. Although stereophotogrammetry may offer a reliable alternative to other techniques, it has seldom been investigated.Purpose. The purpose of this in vitro study was to measure and compare the intraoral scan body deviations of the reference cast with the intraoral scan body distortions obtained by conventional, digital, and stereophotogrammetric techniques.Materials and methods. An edentulous maxillary "all-on-four " cast was prepared with 2 straight and two 17-degree angled screw-retained abutments screwed on the implant. Three capture techniques were compared: the conventional impression technique (CI group) using impression plaster (IP), the digital intraoral scanning (DIS group) technique, and the stereophotogrammetry (SPG group) technique. A calibrated extraoral scanner was used to digitize the definitive cast to compare its intraoral scan body positions with those of the other techniques in terms of global angular distortion and 3D deviations of the whole scan body and flat angled surface alone by using an inspection and metrology software program and the best fit alignment technique. The Kolmogorov-Smirnov and Shapiro-Wilk tests showed normal distribution of the quantitative variables. Thus, the repeated measures analyses of variance followed by univariate analysis and Bonferroni multiple comparison tests were performed to analyze the data (a=.05).Results. Significant global angular discrepancies and 3D deviations of the whole scan body and flat angled surface were found among the CI, DI, and SPG groups for both trueness (P <.001) and precision (P <.001).Conclusions. The stereophotogrammetry capture technique reported the highest accuracy in terms of trueness and precision for the intraoral scan bodies of all the techniques evaluated. However, at the flat angled surface region of the scan body, higher trueness was detected with the digital technique. Conventional impressions showed better trueness results than the digital ones, but the opposite was true of precision.