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Dental impressions are used for capturing details of oral and dental tissues using standard impression techniques and materials (Rudolph et al., 2015). They are essential and widely used for plaster study models manufacturing, used for diagnostic and treatment planning purposes. However, technical innovations in the dental field gave rise to new, faster and more pleasant solutions for both patient and doctor.
The concept of intraoral digital impressions was introduced in dentistry in the early 1980s and had been continuously evolving ever since. Digital workflow allows omitting a few procedural phases, making the process faster and more accurate. A standard digital procedure includes digital intraoral scan, appliance design, 3D printing, and appliance delivery. Virtual systems have changed both the everyday dental practice and dental education. Its constant and rapid development and endless possibilities for its elegant application and work optimization in all dental fields cannot be ignored, and there is a great need for its implementation in Dental Schools' curricula which requires a prior assessment of students' attitudes and preferences as well as the state of the knowledge regarding the impression techniques.
Several problems are connected with the use of conventional impression techniques that could be eliminated by digital scanning, including 'pull', tears, bubbles, voids and material shrinkage. Moreover, because models are cast in plaster or stone, they have some drawbacks in storage and retrieval, diagnostic versatility, transferability and durability (Joffe, 2004). The legal aspects of dental records are also fundamental since federal laws mandate the practitioner to keep and retain records, usually for ten years from the date of the last service to the patient, so there is a great need for rational space management since conventional dental casts require a substantial amount of storage space.
With digital models, data storage is made more efficient, eliminating the need for physical storage space, while also avoiding storage issues of plaster chipping or breakage (Martin et al., 2015).
Orthodontists and other dental medicine specialists are rapidly accepting digital technology and new materials in everyday work. Facial and dental scanners, cone-beam computed tomography, 3D printing, and other modern technologies allow professionals more accurate patient assessment, virtual model storing, treatment planning and appliance manufacturing. Procedural mistakes during conventional impression taking, casting and measuring are minimized using digital impressions, and virtual treatment planning allows fast and straightforward communication between lab and orthodontist's practice and quick and straightforward appliance production (Fleming et al., 2011; Flugge et al., 2013; Grunheid et al., 2014; Hayashi et al., 2013; Wiranto et al., 2013).
The article aimed to assess 4th, 5th and 6th-year students' perception of contemporary impression techniques and preferences towards conventional or digital impression technique and the need for implementation in Dental Schools' curricula. This paper is an extension of a pilot study presented initially in the 4th International Conference on Smart and Sustainable Technologies (SpliTech), Bol, Croatia, 2019, which resulted in impressive yet expected results and the need for new research with more participants included (Kalibovic Govorko et al., 2019).
The paper is organized in following sections: in Introduction, we will review the current work on digital and conventional impressions and comparison between them, in Materials and Methods, we will present our study design, in Results, we will show the results of our study, in Discussion, we will discuss our results and compare our data with current work and present conclusions in the Conclusions section.