Objectives

To provide dental practitioners and researchers with a comprehensive and transparent evidence-based overview of the characteristics of literature regarding initiatives of robot technology in dentistry.

Data

All articles in which robot technology in dentistry is described, except for non-scientific articles and articles containing secondary data (reviews). Amongst others, the following data were extracted: type of study, level of technological readiness, authors’ professional background and the subject of interaction with the robot.

Sources

Bibliographic databases PubMed, Embase, and Scopus were surveyed. A reference search was conducted. The search timeline was between January 1985 and October 2020.

Study selection

A total of 911 articles were screened on title and abstract of which 161 deemed eligible for inclusion. Another 71 articles were excluded mainly because of unavailability of full texts or the sole use of secondary data (reviews). Four articles were included after hand searching the reference lists. In total, 94 articles were included for analysis.

Conclusions

Since 2013 an average of six articles per year concern robot initiatives in dentistry, mostly originating from East Asia (57%). The vast majority of research was categorized as either basic theoretical or basic applied research (80%). Technology readiness levels did not reach higher than three (proof of concept) in 55% of all articles. In 84%, the first author of the included articles had a technical background and in 36%, none of the authors had a dental or medical background. The overall quality of literature, especially in terms of clinical validation, should be considered as low.

中文翻译：

---

牙科机器人技术，系统评价第一部分：文献特征

目标

为牙科医生和研究人员提供全面和透明的循证概述，了解有关牙科机器人技术举措的文献特征。

数据

描述牙科机器人技术的所有文章，非科学文章和包含二手数据的文章（评论）除外。其中，提取了以下数据：研究类型、技术准备水平、作者的专业背景以及与机器人交互的主题。

来源

对书目数据库 PubMed、Embase 和 Scopus 进行了调查。进行了参考搜索。搜索时间线在 1985 年 1 月至 2020 年 10 月之间。

研究选择

共筛选了 911 篇文章的标题和摘要，其中 161 篇被认为符合纳入条件。另有 71 篇文章被排除，主要是因为无法获得全文或仅使用二手数据（评论）。手动搜索参考文献列表后包括四篇文章。共纳入 94 篇文章进行分析。

结论

自 2013 年以来，平均每年有 6 篇文章涉及牙科领域的机器人计划，主要来自东亚（57%）。绝大多数研究被归类为基础理论研究或基础应用研究（80%）。在所有文章的 55% 中，技术准备水平未达到高于 3（概念证明）。在 84% 的文章中，第一作者具有技术背景，在 36% 的作者中，没有人具有牙科或医学背景。文献的整体质量，特别是在临床验证方面，应该被认为是低的。