Dentist’s Perception of Digital and Conventional Fabricated Removable Partial Dentures

Objectives: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the knowledge of general dentists on the process of digital and conventional fabricated removable partial dentures (RPDs).
Methods: Twenty dentists (12 female, 8 male) with a clinical experience of 15 years (3-40y) in general dental practice participated in this study. A validated questionnaire with 10 open questions on the instructions for the dental technician, on their own clinical workflow and on the fabrication of the RPDs, was asked to fill out. Next, RPDs for 4 real life cases (2 upper jaw and 2 lower jaw) were given for evaluation on their corresponding definitive casts ready for the try-in of the framework. For each case there were 2 RPDs fabricated following a given design; 1 by a laboratory technician expert in digital fabrication and 1 by a laboratory technician expert in manually fabricated RPDs. In total 8 RPDs were ad random presented to the 20 dentists in order to evaluate fit, stability, elegancy, finishing, aesthetics and fabrication modus. A dental magnifying loupe (X 2,5 with working distance 34 cm) was available. Paired t-tests were used to identify statistically differences at P<0.05.
Results: There were significant differences among the dentists in terms of comments on prescription, choice of clasps, clinical workflow and their knowledge of the fabrication technique. Almost 50% of the dentists give an open mandate to their dental technician for the design of their RPDs. Age and gender of the dentists were significant: female and young dentists rely more on the expertise of their dental technician. All the dentists stated that they were not able to recognize the difference between the digital fabricated RPDs and the manually fabricated RPDs.
Conclusions: Dentist rely strongly on the dental technician for the removable partial denture design and focus merely on the aesthetic aspects of the clasps. Dentists are not able to distinguish the differences between handmade and digitally fabricated RPDs.