Reliability of the Intraoral Records for programming the Condylar Inclination of the Semiadjustable Articulator

Abstract

The purpose of the investigation was to determine the reliability of intraoral records for the programming of the condylar inclination of the semiadjustable articulator (SAA), performed by dentistry students at the Central University of Ecuador (UCE). The concordance study was of an observational type and was carried out in sixth- and seventh-semester students of the Faculty of Dentistry of the UCE in the period 2019 to 2020. It was applied to a sample made up of 60 students: divided into G1 (n = 30), sixth-semester students and G2 (n = 30), seventh-semester students. The students were given articulated plaster models in an SAA in order to program the condylar inclination based on intraoral records, comparing it with the condylar inclination obtained from a computed tomography (CT) scan by an expert, determining inter-rater reliability. A Fleiss' Kappa test was performed for this study, with a 95% confidence level. The average condylar inclination of the left side measured by the groups of students was 28.68° ± 10.16° and for the right side it was 27.85° ± 10.59°, while in CT, it was 45° on the left side and 35° on the right side. The range of discrepancy of the groups with the CT values is 4.30° to 19.11°, with a significant difference between the programmed condylar inclination of the SAA between the study groups (p <0.05), with greater amount of success in G1 (40% of students programmed the condylar inclination perfectly) compared to G2 (31.67% of students did it perfectly). When performing the Fleiss' Kappa test, the concordance of the condylar inclination in an SAA programmed by the students gave a result with a negative sign, which suggests that there is no concordance of the articulator data compared to the CT, verifying that the students are not trained in this practice. The clinical significance of this study lies in the fact that students must learn to better program the condylar inclination so that the treatments they carry out in the future are jointly and preserving all the normal anatomical factors related to the mouth and the TMJ, in order to do so. achieve more personalized treatments for each patient.