Purpose: The objective of the research was to investigate dimensional accuracy concerning denture teeth deviation and vertical dimensional changes for three-dimensional printed, monolithic dentures relative to heat-cured, acrylic resin dentures.
Materials and methods: A waxed-up reference maxillary denture was constructed on an educational master cast, and then duplicated to produce ten simulated waxed-up dentures. The planned virtual denture was designed by subtracting the scanned cast from the scanned waxed-up denture with the cast. This virtual denture was considered as a reference and saved alone in 3D- Standard Tessellation Language (STL) format. From this reference (CAD maxillary denture) ten DLP dentures were fabricated. Each fabricated heat-cured, and 3D-printed denture was scanned separately, and the scanned data was saved in an STL file. Each STL file of scanned maxillary dentures was superimposed on a reference virtual maxillary denture to evaluate the degree of denture teeth deviation. An electronic digital caliper was used to measure the occlusal vertical dimension (OVD) of the waxed-up denture and after denture fabrication for both groups to evaluate the change in OVD.
Results: A paired t-test was used to compare the recorded data between both groups. It was reported that the higher mean values for either denture teeth deviation or vertical dimensional changes after dentures fabrication were noticed in heat-cured acrylic resin dentures. These values were highly statistically significant between the tested groups for both items of investigations at p ≤ 0.01.