Effect of Tooth Mobility on the Accuracy of Conventional Impressions: A Pilot Study.

Purpose: To study the influence of tooth mobility on the accuracy of conventional impressions.

Materials and methods: In total, 10 patients with mobile anterior teeth and 10 healthy patients were treated with conventional impressions and intraoral digital impressions. The digital impression group was recorded as standard data, the mobile teeth group was recorded as the experimental group, and the healthy anterior teeth group was recorded as the control group. We imported digital impression and irreversible hydrocolloid impression files into Geomagic Wrap and marked reference points to execute N-point alignment, then we recorded the coordinates. Paired-samples t test was used to analyze whether the point coordinates of mobile teeth were statistically significant (a = .05). One-way ANOVA was used to analyze whether there was a relationship between coordinate differences and tooth mobility in the distal, coronal, and buccal directions (a = .05).

Results: In the buccal and coronal directions, the difference was statistically significant between the conventional and digital impression groups. In the buccal direction, the accuracy differences of I-degree and II-degree mobile teeth were 0.149 mm and 0.401 mm, respectively. In the coronal direction, the differences were 0.128 mm and 0.233 mm, respectively. Meanwhile, ANOVA analysis showed that there was a relationship between point coordinate difference and tooth mobility in the buccal and coronal directions.

Conclusions: Conventional impressions can influence the accuracy of mobile tooth impressions. Therefore, digital impressions should be adopted for mobile teeth impressions.