Purpose:The aim of this study was to use dye penetration to measure apical and coronal leakage simultaneously in single-canal teeth that had been treated endodontically using a single-cone obturation technique. Methods: One hundred single-canal, extracted human teeth were cleaned and shaped with ProTaper NEXT rotary files to size-X5 (50/.06), then randomly assigned to five sealer groups for single-cone gutta-percha obturation. The teeth were soaked in 0.6% rhodamine B at 37°C for seven days, then the roots were ground mesiodistally and the maximum apical and coronal dye penetration was measured. Differences in leakage among the sealer groups were examined using the Kruskal-Wallis test. Pairwise comparisons were made using the Mann-Whitney test with Bonferroni correction. Results:The mean values (mm) of dye penetration for AH Plus, Pulp

Purpose:The aim of this study was to categorize the effects of heat on coronal obturation with gutta-percha and sealer using X-ray micro-computed tomography (micro-CT). Methods: Ten single-rooted, extracted human teeth were shaped using ProTaper NEXT files to size X5 (#50/Taper 6%) with 2.5% NaOCl irrigation. A single ProTaper NEXT X5 gutta-percha point was then inserted with epoxy resin (AH Plus) or tricalcium silicate (EndoSequence BC) sealer (n = 5/group), and cut at the cemento-enamel junction. The teeth were scanned using micro-CT (SkyScan1272) to obtain 11 sagittal 2-D images. Three calibrated raters categorized the coronal 0.5 mm of the images into four categories: "swirled sealer and/or gutta-percha without voids" (I), "uniform voids and sealer/gutta-percha" (II), "non-uniform voids and sealer/gutta-percha" (III), and "swirled sealer and/or guttapercha with voids" (IV). Intra-rater and inter-rater reliability were then calculated. Chi-square tests were conducted to determine the significance of differences in each category between sealers. Results:The intra-class correlation coefficient was 0.55 (same rater/two different times) and Fleiss' kappa (different raters/same image) was 0.34.

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