Fig 1.
Flow chart demonstrating experimental design of the study.
Table 1.
The number of polygon points analyzed and the average absolute value discrepancy of all measurement points for each participant.
Fig 2.
Color mapping for each measurement point (Participant a).
A. Digital impression technique. B. Conventional impression technique. Visual inspection of the color mapping data demonstrated a smaller discrepancy (green and blue) between repeated measurements by the two operators for the digital impression technique than for the conventional impression technique (yellow and red).
Fig 3.
The 3D images were divided into 12 regions and the region with the largest discrepancy was visually identified.
A. Digital impression technique. B. Conventional impression technique. The 3D images were divided into 12 regions, and the region with the largest discrepancy was visually identified (red). The largest discrepancy was frequently found on the lingual surface of the second molar for the conventional impression technique (8 out of 12 participants), whereas no such trend was found for the digital impression technique.
Fig 4.
Distribution of dimensional discrepancies between repeated measurements by the 2 different operators for each impression technique (Participant a).
Distribution of discrepancy concentrated on zero for the digital impression technique when compared with the conventional impression technique.
Fig 5.
Average inter-operator discrepancy for the 12 participants (Wilcoxon signed-rank test).