Practitioners face several challenges during the root canal treatment of teeth with wide or immature apices, one of which is working length determination. There is relatively little data regarding the value of radiography and electronic apex locator (EAL) use when root formation is incomplete, and supplementary measurement techniques may be helpful. This review considers length determination for canals with wide or completely open apices in permanent and primary teeth. The Ovid Medline, Web of Science and Scopus databases were searched individually and in combinations to August 2012 using the subject headings 'working length determination' and 'open apex' and revealed only one article. Further headings, 'tooth apex', 'apical constriction', 'resorption', 'foramen size', 'mature root apex', 'immature root apex', 'working length determination', 'apexification', 'open apices', 'open apex', 'open apical foramina', 'canal length determination', 'immature teeth', 'apical diameters', 'electronic apex locators', 'primary teeth', 'treatment outcome' and 'clinical outcome' were entered. Potentially useful articles were chosen for a manual search of bibliography as well as a forward search of citations. Other investigations revealed case reports and some research related to open apices and laboratory studies evaluating EALs, radiography and tactile methods. Some involved permanent teeth of various apical diameters and primary teeth with and without resorption. There is a need to define the term 'open apex'. Clinicians should be aware of the benefits and limitations of all canal measuring techniques involved in managing this problem.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 2. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 23 October 2012.
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#15,588,886
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#471
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#177,289
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Outputs of similar age from International Endodontic Journal
#4
of 19 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 24,704,144 research outputs across all sources so far. This one is in the 34th percentile – i.e., 34% of other outputs scored the same or lower than it.
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