Translucency measurements in teeth and dental materials

摘要

Exact color matching of dental restorative materials to vital teeth is a difficult task for several reasons. These problems will be elaborated upon in the presentation. One of the most important difficulties is that teeth, as well as dental restorative materials, are translucent, and thus the color impression is a product of light scattering, back scattering, transmission, and spectral modifications inside these objects. Classic colorimetry is insufficient to provide an exact color match. Additional information about the translucency factor of the considered object is necessary to provide full reproducibility. In this article, we describe the TransluDent~(TM), a complementary product to ColorDent~(TM), which measures the translucency of teeth and dental materials. TransluDent? determines the translucency by measuring the light transmitted through an object and the light scattered inside of the object. The translucency measurements were performed on two groups of subjects. One group consisted of people in their twenties, and the second group of subjects was in their fifties. For comparison, several sets of dental shade-guides were also tested. The great discrepancy in the translucency factor between human teeth and shade guides available on the market may explain the difficulty in color matching of dental restorative materials to teeth.