These are the color-marking foils, articulating papers, and silk ribbons, which are used by clinicians to identify occlusal contacts in daily clinical practice. The range of thickness of these commercially available occlusal indicators lies between 8–200 microns. While indicators of this type disclose the location of contacts, they provide no information about the relative occlusal force of the occlusal contacts. Given a mere 21% reliability of there existing an association between occlusal markings and occlusal contact force levels, any force level conclusions drawn from conventional indicators have been described as being “tantamount to clinical guessing”. Due to this inadequate representation of the relative occlusal force levels, the usefulness of conventional indicators should be confined to “contact locators” solely, and not as occlusal force descriptors (these indicators have been incorrectly advocated in many published papers and occlusion textbooks, to be capable of describing occlusal force).
Published in Chapter:
Precision and Reliability of the T-Scan III System: Analyzing Occlusion and the Resultant Timing and Distribution of Forces in the Dental Arch
Bernd Koos (University Medical Center Schleswig-Holstein, Germany)
Copyright: © 2015
|Pages: 29
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-6587-3.ch003
Abstract
Precise analysis of occlusal contacts and occlusal force is a problem in functional diagnostics that has not yet been satisfactorily resolved, despite the fact that the deleterious consequences of an unbalanced occlusion are widespread and can be severe. In clinical practice, the present-day analysis of the occlusion is reduced to depicting force with color-marking foils that leave ink marks upon the teeth. However, these foils only indicate the localization of contacts, but do not describe reliably the occlusal force relationships. Precise analysis that incorporates time resolution and plots the distribution of forces within the occlusion is not possible when employing the traditional occlusal indicator methods. A detailed occlusal force and timing analysis can only be provided by performing a computer-assisted analysis, using the T-Scan III system (Tekscan, Inc. S. Boston, MA, USA), which records changing relative occlusal force levels and real-time occlusal contact sequence data with High Definition (HD) recording sensors. This chapter demonstrates the accuracy and reliability of this computer-based occlusal measurement method that reliably describes the time-dependent distribution of occlusal force evolution.