Čes. stomatol. Prakt. zub. lék. (Czech Dental Journal) 2025; 125(1): 13-22 | DOI: 10.51479/cspzl.2025.002

PRINCIPLES OF INTRAORAL SCANNERS AND MEASUREMENT OF THEIR ACCURACY

Hyšpler P.1, Dostálová T.2
1 Stomatologické oddělení, Ústřední vojenská nemocnice – Vojenská fakultní nemocnice Praha
2 Stomatologická klinika dětí a dospělých, 2. lékařská fakulta, Univerzita Karlova, a Fakultní nemocnice v Motole, Praha

Introduction and aim: A fully digital workflow is increasingly dominating our surgeries. For small prosthetic reconstructions on teeth or implants, the precision and trueness of certain intraoral scanners are not only sufficient, but significantly better than the conventional technology – dental impression/plaster model. A completely different situation arises with large reconstructions. The aim of this literature review was to summarize the current knowledge on intraoral scanner technologies and their accuracy measurements. Another aim was to evaluate devices and procedures for improving the accuracy of intraoral scans in large fixed prosthetic reconstructions.

Methods: The PubMed/Medline, Scopus, and Embase databases were searched using the following keywords: “Intraoral scanner”, “CAD/CAM”, “Trueness”, “Precision”, “Optical impression”, “Custom-made measuring device”, “Guided implant scanning”, “Continuous scan strategy”. The results were limited to articles published in the English language between 2010 and 2024.

Results: Thirty-seven publications met the inclusion criteria. There are very few articles describing the technology used by currently available intraoral scanners. Twenty-one publications focused on improving the accuracy of intraoral scanning using new procedures or devices. The remainder of the included articles compared the accuracy of intraoral scanners across different products or compared to traditional prosthetic procedures. Most of the older studies comparing the accuracy of intraoral scanners used distance measurements and angular errors. In more recent studies, the method of superimposing surface data obtained by 3D scanners was predominant. Only one study employed the pyramid replacement method with Procrustean analysis.

Conclusion: Articles addressing the principles of intraoral scanners are scarce and rarely found in dental journals. An analysis of the available literature shows that there are multiple options to improve the accuracy of intraoral scanning. These strategies primarily involve optimizing the scanning path and incorporating additional devices to avoid merging errors in the prosthetic workflow. Extraoral scanners and the use of prosthetic lab scanners are especially promising. Reducing the merging error of intraoral scans using different devices probably does not have the potential to ensure the required accuracy.

Keywords: intraoral scanner, CAD/CAM, trueness, precision, optical impression, custom-made measuring device, guided implant scanning, continuous scan strategy

Received: December 9, 2024; Revised: January 11, 2025; Accepted: January 11, 2025; Prepublished online: February 27, 2025; Published: March 10, 2025  Show citation

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Hyšpler P, Dostálová T. PRINCIPLES OF INTRAORAL SCANNERS AND MEASUREMENT OF THEIR ACCURACY. Čes. stomatol. Prakt. zub. lék. 2025;125(1):13-22. doi: 10.51479/cspzl.2025.002.
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