An accurate and efficient method for occlusal tooth wear assessment using 3D digital dental models

Nikolaos Gkantidis,Konstantinos Dritsas,Demetrios Halazonetis,Christos Katsaros,Yijin Ren

doi:10.1038/s41598-020-66534-4

Abstract

Tooth or material wear in a dentition is a common finding that requires timely diagnosis for management and prevention of further loss or associated esthetic or functional impairment. Various qualitative and quantitative methods have been suggested to measure tooth or material wear, but they present with limitations, such as imprecision, subjectivity, or high complexity. Here we developed and assessed an efficient 3D superimposition method to accurately measure occlusal tooth wear on 3D digital dental models. For this purpose, teeth on plaster casts were manually grinded on their occlusal surfaces to simulate various degrees of tooth wear. The casts were scanned using a surface scanner. Grinded tooth crowns (T1) were segmented and compared to the original crowns (T0) using five 3D surface superimposition techniques and a gold standard technique (GS). GS measurements were obtained by using intact adjacent structures as superimposition references. The technique of choice (complete crown with 30% estimated overlap of meshes) showed the best reproducibility (maximum difference < 0.050 mm3) and excellent agreement with the GS technique (median difference: 0.032 mm3). The suggested 3D superimposition method offers a highly efficient and accurate tool for tooth wear assessment, which could be applicable to clinical conditions.

Highlights

Tooth or material wear in a dentition is a common finding that requires timely diagnosis for management and prevention of further loss or associated esthetic or functional impairment
There was a consistent pattern of tooth wear amounts in each tooth type, measured through the gold standard technique, verifying the study setting (Supplementary Figure S2)
The repeatability of the crown as superimposition reference (CC)(D) technique was slightly better even compared to the gold standard technique (GS) technique (Fig. 4)

Summary

Introduction

Tooth or material wear in a dentition is a common finding that requires timely diagnosis for management and prevention of further loss or associated esthetic or functional impairment. We developed and assessed an efficient 3D superimposition method to accurately measure occlusal tooth wear on 3D digital dental models For this purpose, teeth on plaster casts were manually grinded on their occlusal surfaces to simulate various degrees of tooth wear. The main shortcoming of such indices is that they are subjective and their sensitivity is unsatisfactory, especially when tooth wear is assessed in relatively short time-spans[9] For this reason, quantitative methods on 3-dimensional (3D) dental models have been developed[10]. Numerous factors can influence wear assessment through these techniques, such as movement of teeth between two time points, the accuracy of the obtained 3D surface model, especially in areas that are inherently difficult to scan, the reference areas selected to register the serial surface models and the software settings used for the superimposition

Objectives

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion