Evaluation of repeatability of different alignment methods to obtain digital interocclusal records: An in vitro study

The alignment of the maxillary and mandibular digital scans obtained with an intraoral scanner (IOS) generates digital interocclusal records. Although the accuracy of maxillary and mandibular digital scans obtained from an IOS is widely studied, the accuracy of digital interocclusal records obtained with them is not; even less studied is the accuracy (trueness and precision) of the alignment methods that are available to obtain them.

The purpose of this in vitro study was to assess the precision under repeatability conditions (repeatability) of the different alignment methods used to obtain digital interocclusal records.

Digital scans of maxillary and mandibular casts of a dentate healthy adult were acquired with an IOS. Casts were then mounted in maximum intercuspal position in a semi-adjustable mechanical articulator (1801 AR Model PSH Articulator), and left and right occlusal digital scans were acquired with the IOS. Occlusal digital scans were repeated 7 times under repeatability conditions. After obtaining each pair of occlusal digital scans, the software program of the IOS automatically aligned the maxillary and mandibular digital scans with occlusal digital scans (TRI method), resulting in 7 digital interocclusal records composed of aligned maxillary and mandibular digital scans and occlusal digital scans. All 7 sets of aligned digital scans were exported and realigned in a dental computer-aided design software program by means of global and reference alignment methods (EXO-B and EXO-R methods, respectively). To assess the repeatability, the 7 aligned digital scan sets of each group were repositioned in the common coordinate system by aligning maxillary digital scans, and repeatability was calculated in terms of the distance between the vertices of the mandibular digital scans for each of the possible nonrepeating combinations of pairs (⁷C₂=21). The repeatability was tested by using the Kruskal-Wallis test for nonparametric distribution followed by the Mann-Whitney U test and Bonferroni correction for pairwise comparisons (α=.05).

The median with interquartile range for the TRI alignment method was 47 (27) μm for the EXO-B method 41 (25) μm and 16 (5) μm for EXO-R. The Kruskal-Wallis test showed statistical difference between test groups (P<.05). The post hoc Dunn test with Bonferroni adjustment detected significant statistical differences between the EXO-R-TRI (P<.001) and EXO-R-EXO-B (P<.001) alignment methods.

This study found that the alignment method could influence the repeatability of digital interocclusal records. The reference best-fit alignment method (EXO-R) provided better repeatability.