Print Quality is Very Important for Fabrication of Oral Appliances or Restorations

A very important principle to keep in mind with intra-oral scanners is how that data is printed. There are too many reasons to list what can constitute a mis-print. One method to verify accuracy of your printed models is to scan them and take that digital model and merge them with your intra-oral scan model. You pick some common data points and manually align them.

Once that is performed, you can do “best fit matching” and the more green and blue you see in the color profile, the more accurately your meshwork or data points match each other. Once you do that you can take your slice tool and look at the contours of the data and see how well they relate to each other. In this case, we scanned the upper printed model and then merged it with the intra-oral scan used to fabricate the device. There was not a single adjustment made to the appliance for occlusion or for fit