LAUSR

The world's largest dental fair, the Internationale Dental‐Schau (IDS) promoted as “The Greatest Dental Show on Earth” ended just a few days ago in Cologne. The claim is probably true since this year, there were 155.000 visitors over the 5 days that scrambled amongst the 2,305 exhibitors. As expected, the array of new equipment, tools, materials, and appliances on display was daunting. A conspicuous element was the presence of numerous digital hardware and software technologies. The consequences of digitalization to compress work time and/or replace manual labor‐intensive tasks of the dental professionals has until now predominantly impacted dental technicians. Personally, I am still sceptical that replacing highly skilled craftspersons in dental technology with less competent workhands trained only to run a particular CAD software or operate a particular CAM device is positive (Jokstad, 2016). A general belief is that digital tools assure better patient care, including the notion that dental devices manufactured by machines are of equal or even higher quality than those made by human hands. We can therefore expect that new digital technologies will likely continue to be launched at events like IDS. Being a prosthodontist, I spent much time at the IDS this year trying to obtain facts about the new products within oral rehabilitation that enable the assimilation of data from tomography technologies with surface rendering from intraoral and extraoral scanning. Some of these products can even integrate physiological and jaw tracking data for CAD–CAM manufacturing of dental devices (Jokstad, 2017). However, this editorial is not about innovative digital technologies, but rather about the perplexing realization that for many, the three terms accuracy, precision, and trueness seem to be incomprehensible. It was even more discouraging to solicit information about repeatability and reproducibility of new digital products, although I recognize that their interpretation in a statistical context differ from our everyday use of the terms. Admittedly, because the IDS draws such a large crowd, every exhibitor booth was staffed for the occasion with salespersons, assistants, technicians, clinicians, perhaps the occasional engineer or crowd of dental students and likely including several relatives too. Any engineer will easily be able to explain how accuracy is the sum of trueness and precision, and specifically in Cologne, Germany, a local engineer would explain the same with the terms “Genauigkeit,” “Richtigkeit,” and “Präzision.” Nevertheless, I believe that we as dental professionals owe it to our patients to identify the elements of accuracy of new digital tools developed for diagnostic purposes or for fabricating dental devices with CAD–CAMmachinery. A start is simply to distinguishing between the three terms. I hope that the reader may understand these differences by visualizing the scenario in the following narrative.