The role of virtual articulators in dental occlusion analysis

Today, virtual reality has a broad spectrum of applications in fields as diverse as architecture, sports, arts or medicine. One of the applications of virtual reality in medicine is the virtual articulator, a digital instrument that was designed as a tool for comprehensive analysis of static and dynamic occlusal relations, the purpose being to substitute the use of mechanical articulators and consequently, of the mechanical errors involved by their use. This paper is a systematic review of the literature on published studies about the functionality and application of the virtual articulators in the analysis of dental occlusion. An electronic search was conducted based on a combination of keywords, using the search engines of Pubmed/Medline and ScienceDirect. Most of the identified studies show that the reproduction of occlusal contacts using virtual articulators has superior, or at least similar, fidelity compared to the conventional techniques, both in static or dynamic manners.