Kyriakos Liverdos, loannis Lavrentiades, Anastasios Spyridopoulos, Dimitris Gorefis
Emfytevmatologia 2006; 10(4): 323-334.
Abstract:
Without proper implant placement, even if osseointegration is achieved, treatment may be considered as a failure due to aesthetic compromises of the final restoration. The need for harmonious balance between functional, aesthetic and biological parameters of an implant-supported restoration led to the development of the restoration-driven implant placement in which the ideal placement of implants is determined by the necessities of the final restoration. This requires a meticulous presurgical evaluation as an insufficiently planned case can bring poor results and dissatisfaction to the dentist and patient While the ideal placement of dental implants should be determined by prosthetic parameters, the exact positioning of the implant in the desired place during surgery is often difficult The surgical guide is the mean that transfers the information obtained during presurgical diagnosis and evaluation to the surgical field and it helps the surgeon to precisely locate the ideal place for the implant and to follow the degree of the desired parallelism during implant placement Despite the great help that a surgical template provides to the surgeon the strict attachment to its use is not always right as in many cases the surgeon must make a compromise between a prosthetically ideal position for the placement of an implant which takes into consideration the initial planning, and a surgically ideal position which takes into consideration bone availability. In the latter case the surgical template is still very useful as with its use any intraoperative decisions concerning the position and angulation of the implant can be made in a way that will fulfill the majority of the requirements that the initial planning dictates.
