A new approach to microleakage assessement: review

Microleakage continues to be a topic of great interest, despite of advances and various modifications in terms of technique and placement of material in both restorative and endodontics clinical failures still exist. Most of the failure are probably attributed to poor marginal adaptability, proliferation of microorganisms that remain viable after chemical and mechanical preparation and cause periapical tissue irritation. There are various methods used for assessment of microleakage, some of them lack clinical relevance, while others are technique sensitive however all the methods are two dimensional and hence they definitely cannot correlate to the exact clinical leakage occurring in at the tooth restoration interface or apical leakage. Recently a three dimensional microleakage assessment method has be introduced known as the micro computed tomography which enables a three dimensional evaluation of microleakage both coronal and apically. This review describes three dimensional methods for leakage assessment and its advantages over other methods used for microleakage testing along with the predictability of the most popularly used microleakage testing methods.