Comparison of two methods for measuring generalized wear of dental materials.

The object of this study was to analyze two measuring methods for determining the amount of generalized wear of dental materials. Using a recently developed three-body wear testing machine, generalized wear defect was produced on the surface of various dental materials. Although the generalized wear was defined as the depth of the enamel exposed at the cavity margin for both methods, this depth was measured with two different devices. One is an image-analyzer and the other was a profilometer. From the results of this study, it was confirmed that measurement by means of profilometer gave almost the same wear values with those by image-analyzer. In addition, the measurement by profilometer seemed to be more precise and not very much sophisticated.