Keynote Address: Dental Color Perception and Resin Composite Layering

In restorative dentistry today, mainly the personal experience of the dentist guides the color selection in material layering. This is often helped by one of the commonly used color scales. Unfortunately, often the materials used to create these references are very different from those used in restoration and this leads to misleading information.

Instrumental color matching is becoming more and more interesting today. In dental applications mainly two devices are used: good quality general purpose cameras and dental spectrophotometers. Cameras are theoretically simple to use, but if repeatability is required, they need a strict protocol to be used successfully. Spectrophotometers are specifically designed and usually give a coherent response among their own measurements, but they differ among various brands. Since companies creating restorative materials use their own measuring devices, these dental spectrophotometers can not match their colors without a brand specific tuning of the results.

Recent research at the University of Brescia shows that Resin Composites can be characterized and physically layered in order to match the tooth color instrumentally within the color resolution of human color perception. This methodology helps both the beginner dentist and the experienced one. Moreover it can be used to successfully teach and train the dental technicians.