Department of Prosthodontics,Pomeranian Medical University,Szczecin.
Department of Maxillofacial Surgery,Pomeranian Medical University,
Int J Technol Assess Health Care. 2017 Jan;33(4):487-493. doi: 10.1017/S0266462317000708. Epub 2017 Aug 31.
Technological development and the need for electronic health records management resulted in the need for a computer with dedicated, commercial software in daily dental practice. The alternative for commercial software may be open-source solutions. Therefore, this study reviewed the current literature on the availability and use of open-source software (OSS) in dentistry.
A comprehensive database search was performed on February 1, 2017. Only articles published in peer-reviewed journals with a focus on the use or description of OSS were retrieved. The level of evidence, according to Oxford EBM Centre Levels of Evidence Scale was classified for all studies. Experimental studies underwent additional quality reporting assessment.
The screening and evaluation process resulted in twenty-one studies from 1,940 articles found, with 10 of them being experimental studies. None of the articles provided level 1 evidence, and only one study was considered high quality following quality assessment. Twenty-six different OSS programs were described in the included studies of which ten were used for image visualization, five were used for healthcare records management, four were used for educations processes, one was used for remote consultation and simulation, and six were used for general purposes.
Our analysis revealed that the dental literature on OSS consists of scarce, incomplete, and methodologically low quality information.
技术发展和电子健康记录管理的需求促使牙科日常实践需要使用专用的商业软件的计算机。商业软件的替代方案可能是开源解决方案。因此，本研究回顾了有关牙科领域开源软件 (OSS) 的可用性和使用情况的当前文献。
2017 年 2 月 1 日进行了全面的数据库检索。仅检索了重点关注 OSS 使用或描述的同行评审期刊上发表的文章。根据牛津循证医学中心证据水平量表对所有研究进行了证据水平分类。对实验研究进行了额外的质量报告评估。
经过筛选和评估过程，从 1940 篇文章中找到了 21 篇研究，其中 10 篇为实验研究。没有一篇文章提供一级证据，只有一篇研究经过质量评估后被认为是高质量的。在纳入的研究中描述了 26 种不同的 OSS 程序，其中 10 种用于图像可视化，5 种用于医疗记录管理，4 种用于教育过程，1 种用于远程咨询和模拟，6 种用于通用目的。
我们的分析表明，牙科领域的 OSS 文献信息稀缺、不完整且方法学质量低。
