implants the journal of oral implantology United Kingdom Edition

Accuracy in guided implantology is an issue. The ability to perform implant place- ment both safely and correctly, in order to load a pre-surgical CAD/CAM bar or ce- mentable metal final framework prosthesis and to digitise the entire procedure, is widely researched. Accuracy is a value also in a clas- sical II-stage protocol and respecting hard and soft tissues for long-term implant site stability. There is an ongoing debate amongst clinicians regarding which is the best avail- able system. Vercruyssen summarises this debate.1 The article reviews only some of the published articles on this topic. All of these articles emphasise the error margins and that they can be considered clinically more or less acceptable, and determine accuracy in implant placement by means of superim- position. In mathematical terms, “precision” means the repeatability of a measurement, and “accuracy” refers to the correspondence of this measurement to the truth. In our field, accuracy has been considered the correspon- dence of the placed implant to the planning. Fortin defines “accuracy” as an ideal, at pres- ent somewhat impractical, when considering a definitive prosthesis for immediate loading, with the present systems only offering pre- dictable results (and as such only long-term reinforced provisional will be available), but does not quantify a threshold.2 According to Di Giacomo, at present a post-operative im- pression appears to be always necessary for immediate loading with a definitive prosthe- sis.3 Guided implantology is far better than a free-hand approach, however. A guard-rail- New concepts in computer guided implantology Part I: Thread timing and implant phase Author_Dr Gian Telara Fig. 1a_Components of the bottle- neck device. Fig. 1b_Embedded sleeve. Fig. 1c_Ostetomic sleeve. Fig. 1d_Modified extender to fit the osteotomy sleeve - any hand-free surgical kit will work. Fig. 1e_Bottle-neck. Fig. 1f-h_Bottle-neck created. Fig. 1a Fig. 1b Fig. 1c Fig. 1d Fig. 1e Fig. 1f I 21 clinical _ guided implantology I implants2_2012