An evaluation of student and clinician perception of digital and conventional implant impressions
Section snippets
Material and Methods
This study was approved by the Harvard Medical School Committee on Human Studies (CHS No. M20078-101). The participants of the study consisted of 30 second-year dental students at the Harvard School of Dental Medicine (HSDM) who had no experience with either conventional or digital implant impression making and 30 dental professionals who had more than 5 years of clinical experience with conventional impressions and minimal experience with digital impressions. The methods of making the
Results
Participants' responses regarding their perceptions on the level of difficulty with conventional and digital impression techniques are presented in Table I. On a 0-to-100 VAS, the student group scored a mean (standard deviation) difficulty level of 43.1 (±18.5) for conventional impression technique and 30.6 (±17.6) for the digital impression technique (P=.006).5 The clinician group presented a mean difficulty level of 30.9 (±19.6) for the conventional impression technique and 36.5 (±20.6) for
Discussion
The data support rejecting the null hypothesis that there is no difference in difficulty level between students and experienced clinicians when performing a conventional implant impression. However, the results support not rejecting the null hypothesis in that there is no difference in difficulty level between the groups that use digital implant impressions.
Even digital impressions have also been successfully integrated into dental laboratory and practice.11 The initial concern of the newly
Conclusions
Within the limitations of this in vitro study, the following conclusions were made.
- 1.
The difficulty level of digital impressions was same between the student and the clinician groups.
- 2.
Conventional impression was more difficult for the student group to perform than clinician group.
- 3.
The student group favored the digital impression technique, whereas the clinician group did not show preference over either impression technique.
- 4.
The clinician group felt more proficient with the conventional impression
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