The surface roughness affects the bone response to dental implants. A primary aim of the roughness is to increase the bone-implant interface shear strength. Surface roughness is generally characterized by means of surface roughness parameters. It was demonstrated that the normally used parameters cannot discriminate between surfaces expected to give a high interface shear strength from surfaces expected to give a low interface shear strength. It was further demonstrated that the skewness parameter can do this discrimination. A problem with this parameter is that it is sensitive to isolated peaks and valleys. Another roughness parameter which on theoretical grounds can be supposed to give valuable information on the quality of a rough surface is kurtosis. This parameter is also sensitive to isolated peaks and valleys. An implant surface was assumed to have a fairly well-defined and homogenous “semiperiodic” surface roughness upon which isolated peaks were superimposed. In a computerized simulation, it was demonstrated that by using small sampling lengths during measurement, it should be possible to get accurate values of the skewness and kurtosis parameters.
The surface roughness of dental implants affects the bone response elicited. Surface roughness is generally described by a range of surface texture parameters. The aim of the present study was to use computerized simulation to investigate the extent to which the lateral resolution of an instrument/method limits the accuracy of certain surface roughness parameters. The lateral resolution was defined as the pixel size of a profiling system. A surface roughness was simulated by a trigonometric function with random periodicity and amplitude. The function was divided into an array of pixels simulating the pixels of the profiling system. The mean height value for each pixel was used to calculate the surface roughness parameters. It was found that the accuracy of all the surface roughness parameters investigated decreased with increasing pixel size. This tendency was most pronounced for mean slope and developed length ratio; amounting to about 80% of their true values for a pixel size of 20% of the true mean high-spot spacing. It was concluded that the lateral resolution of an instrument/method severely compromises the precision of surface roughness parameters measured for roughness features with a mean high-spot spacing less than five times the lateral resolution.
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