Exploring the Role of Digital Dental Previsualization within the context of Rehabilitation Dentistry

Abstract

As part of creating a beautiful smile, aesthetic dental rehabilitation plays an important role. Re-garding aesthetic analy-sis in the context of oral rehabilitation and treatment predictability, Dig-ital Smile Design (DSD), mainly through plat-forms like SmileCloud®, provides invaluable re-sources. Our prospective study aimed to examine the relationship be-tween the clinical experi-ence of dental practitioners and their proficiency in using DSD (SmileCloud). Additionally, the study assessed the association between previsualization scores and the category of respondents in terms of their connec-tion to the field of dentistry (laypeople, dental students, and dentists). The study included 11 subjects for whom three different dental practitioners (a 2nd and a 6th-year dental student and a 2nd-year resident doctor in Prosthodontics) created a DSD using SmileCloud. The DSDs were evaluated in an online survey regarding tooth colour, shape, and over-all smile appearance. A number of 220 responses have been collected from 48 dentists, 86 dental students and 86 lay-people. The DSD created by the 2nd year resident doctor in Prostho-dontics has received significantly higher scores for tooth shape and overall smile appearance (p<0.05), as well as for the design (p<0.05) and design*respondent (p<0.05) variables. The practi-tioner’s clinical experience considerably impacted aesthetic dental rehabilitation tools, which means there is always a learning curve involved.

Keywords

• dental rehabilitation
• digital previsualization
• dsd
• aesthetic dentistry
• smilecloud soft-ware
• digital dentistry
• dentofacial harmony