A novel in vivo method to evaluate trueness of digital impressions

Background: Intraoral scanners are devices for capturing digital impressions in dentistry. Until now, several in vitro studies have assessed the trueness of digital impressions, but in vivo studies are missing. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to introduce a new method to assess trueness of intraoral scanners and digital impressions in an in vivo clinical set-up. Methods: A digital impression using an intraoral scanner (Trios (R) 3 Cart wired, 3-Shape, Copenhagen, Denmark) and a conventional alginate impression (Cavex Impressional*, Cavex, Haarlem, the Netherlands) as clinical reference were made for two patients assigned for full mouth extraction. A total of 30 teeth were collected upon surgery after impressions making. The gypsum model created from conventional impression and extracted teeth were then scanned in a lab scanner (Activity 885 (R), SmartOptics, Bochum, Germany). Digital model of the intraoral scanner (DM), digital model of the conventional gypsum cast (CM) and those of the extracted natural teeth (NT) were imported to a reverse engineering software (3-matic (R), Materialise, Leuven, Belgium) in which the three models were registered then DM and CM were compared to their corresponding teeth in NT by distance map calculations. Results: DM had statistically insignificant better trueness when compared to CM for total dataset (p = 0.15), statistically insignificant better trueness for CM when mandibular arches analyzed alone (p = 0.56), while a significantly better DM trueness (p = 0.013) was found when only maxillary arches were compared. Conclusions: Our results show that digital impression technique is clinically as good as or better than the current reference standard for study models of orthognathic surgery patients.