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Can identical dental shade guides be used interchangeably?
Behrad Rahbani Nobar1, Farhad Tabatabaian2, Mahshid Namdari3
1School of Dentistry, Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran.
Objective:
To determine if identical dental shade guides can be used interchangeably considering their precision.
Materials And Methods:
Twenty Vita classical (VC) and Vita 3D-Master (VM) shade guides were subjected to spectrophotometric measurements and their CIELab values were measured in three shade tab regions: incisal, middle, and cervical and also in total. The mean L*, a*, and b* values for analogous shade tabs were calculated to identify CIELab values for typical shades. ∆E00 color differences between a typical shade and its analogous shade tabs were measured. ∆E00 values were compared with perceptibility (∆E00 = 0.8) and acceptability (∆E00 = 1.8) thresholds using one-sample t test (α = 0.05). An error was considered when the ∆E00 value was greater than the threshold. Subsequently, the shade guides' precision scores were calculated.
Results:
Mean ∆E00 values ranged between 0.3 and 0.5 for VC tabs and between 0.3 and 0.6 for VM tabs. Precision scores for both shade guides ranged from 83.3% to 100%, considering the perceptibility threshold. Regarding the acceptability threshold, precision scores for VC ranged from 93.3% to 100%, while the precision scores for VM were 100%.
Conclusions:
Owing to high precision of VC and VM, identical dental shade guides can be used interchangeably.
Clinical Significance:
Using identical dental shade guides interchangeably may affect the color results of restorative treatments. This study identified high levels of precision for identical shade tabs of Vita classical and Vita 3D-Master across different batches. Thus, similar dental shade guides can be used interchangeably.
