The rapid adoption of computer-aided impression technologies has revolutionized contemporary prosthodontics, offering streamlined clinical workflows, reduced chairside time, and enhanced patient comfort.
While Intraoral Scanners (IOS) have demonstrated exceptional accuracy in single-tooth preparations and short-span quadrants, recording a complete dental arch in a living patient remains one of the most demanding benchmarks in digital dentistry.
Factors such as intraoral humidity, limited space, soft tissue mobility, and scan-stitching algorithms can introduce cumulative deviations across extended geometric spans.
Clinicians are frequently confronted with the question of whether direct digital impressions can truly rival the dimensional fidelity of traditional elastomeric materials—such as Polyether and Polyvinylsiloxane (PVS)—when capturing full-arch anatomy under actual clinical conditions.
In the rigorous in vivo study "Trueness of full-arch dental models obtained by digital and conventional impression techniques: an in vivo study," published in Scientific Reports (Springer Nature), researchers evaluated complete- and partial-arch trueness by benchmarking intraoral scans (CEREC Omnicam and TRIOS 3) against conventional gypsum casts digitized with high-resolution laboratory and industrial reference scanners.
By analyzing three-dimensional surface deviations across anterior and posterior segments, this paper delivers critical evidence-based insights to help dental practitioners determine where digital workflows excel and where conventional elastomeric techniques maintain their ground.
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Key Scientific & Clinical Highlights Covered
✔ Full-Arch Dimensional Trueness: Evaluating global deviation across the dental arch, where advanced intraoral scanners demonstrated full-arch trueness comparable to high-precision polyvinylsiloxane (Affinis) and polyether impressions.
✔ Segmental Deviation Patterns (Anterior vs. Posterior): Intraoral scanners exhibited significantly lower deviations in the anterior sextant compared to posterior regions, highlighting the impact of scan distance, interproximal anatomy, and optical stitching across the curvature of the arch.
✔ Local Discrepancy & Stitching Accumulation: Identifying why digital impression systems may yield higher localized deviations over long spans despite maintaining an overall acceptable global accuracy.
✔ In Vivo Clinical Viability: Confirming that modern complete-arch digital impressions serve as a dependable, highly reproducible alternative to conventional physical impressions for fixed prosthodontic rehabilitations.
Understanding the biomechanical and optical behavior of full-arch impressions empowers clinicians to make evidence-based decisions, ensuring optimal marginal adaptation, passive framework fit, and long-term restorative predictability.
📖 Ready to evaluate the comparative accuracy data between intraoral scanning and conventional impression materials? Explore the complete three-dimensional difference analysis, review the in vivo methodology, and download the full open-access article in PDF format on Nature / Scientific Reports here.
