Objectives The development of 3D photography systems allows surgeons a radiation-free registration
of the face. Those 3DScans can improve the planning and documentation of Facial plastic
surgery. The question of whether the accuracy and precision of the different 3D image
acquisition systems differ from one another is of high importance. Inexpensive devices
such as the smartphone can be useful if they are sufficiently accurate.
Material and methods To determine the accuracy and precision of the various 3D photography systems, we
created 3D scans of 20 healthy volunteers using (a) Artec Space Spider (b) Densply
Sirona Planmeca and (c) iPhoneXR using Bellus 3D application. As reference, we digitalized
a plaster model of the nose .All resulting standard tesselation language (.stl) files
of the noses were compared to the original, virtual .stl files of the digitalized
plaster model. The root mean square error (RMSE) was calculated for each surface (Artec
Studio 13 Professional × 64; Artec Group; Luxembourg) to determine which 3D scan
shows the highest accuracy.
Results The Wilcoxon signed-rank test was used. The Artec Space Spider scans significantly
showed the best RSME analysis, better than the Densply Sirona Planmeca and the Bellus
3D application (p = 0,018). There is no significant difference between the Densply
Sirona Planmeca and the Bellus 3D application (p= 0,176).
Conclusion The study provides a comparison of the accuarcy of three different 3D photography
systems. Nose scans using Artec Space Spider showed the highest precision and accuracy.
However it is foreseeable that compact, handheld mobile device solutions are promising
alternatives .Therefore an appropriate balance between the clinical needs and the
technical opportunities must be found.
