Developing an All-Digital Workflow for Dental Skills Assessment: Part II, Surface Analysis, Benchmarking, and Grading

Area of Science:

• Dental Education
• Biomaterials Science
• Digital Dentistry

Background:

• Visual inspection (VI) of dental student waxups shows low precision and accuracy, impacting grade validity.
• Current grading rubrics are oversimplified and misapply ratio measurements to ordinal data, hindering accurate morphological assessment.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and implement a digital assessment workflow for dental waxups.
• To compare the digital workflow's outcomes with traditional visual inspection.
• To enhance the precision and accuracy of dental waxup evaluations.

Main Methods:

• 67 student waxups were scanned using an intraoral scanner.
• Open-source software analyzed digital scans against standard typodont teeth.
• Percentage contour variation and surface roughness were computed based on clinical tolerance data.

Main Results:

• The digital assessment workflow demonstrated significantly higher accuracy and precision (ICC=0.866) than visual inspection.
• Digital grades generally exceeded visual inspection assessments, correcting individual errors.
• Students found the digital workflow easy to use for self-evaluation and visualization.

Conclusions:

• A novel digital grading workflow was developed using portable data formats and open-source software.
• This accessible digital method can be adopted by any dental school with intraoral scanning capabilities.
• The digital workflow provides a more precise and accurate method for evaluating dental student waxups.