3D Method for Occlusal Tooth Wear Assessment in Presence of Substantial Changes on Other Tooth Surfaces

Early diagnosis and timely management of tooth or dental material wear is imperative to avoid extensive restorations. Previous studies suggested different methods for tooth wear assessment, but no study has developed a three-dimensional (3D) superimposition technique applicable in cases where tooth surfaces, other than the occlusal, undergo extensive morphological changes. Here, we manually grinded plaster incisors and canines to simulate occlusal tooth wear of varying severity in teeth that received a wire retainer bonded on their lingual surfaces, during the assessment period. The corresponding dental casts were scanned using a surface scanner. The modified tooth crowns were best-fit approximated to the original crowns using seven 3D superimposition techniques (two reference areas with varying settings) and the gold standard technique (GS: intact adjacent teeth and alveolar processes as superimposition reference), which provided the true value. Only a specific technique (complete crown with 20% estimated overlap of meshes), which is applicable in actual clinical data, showed perfect agreement with the GS technique in all cases (median difference: -0.002, max absolute difference: 0.178 mm³). The outcomes of the suggested and the GS technique were highly reproducible (max difference < 0.040 mm³). The presented technique offers low cost, convenient, accurate, and risk-free tooth wear assessment.