Evaluation of the Canal Transportation Following Glide Path Preparation with Different Rotary Systems: A Comparative Study

Objectives. Ideal root canal shaping might be more challenging particularly in cases with severely curved canals or complex anatomical variations. Glide path preparation is suggested as a critical step to achieve ideal canal preparation. The present study is aimed at evaluating transportation at different levels of the canal following glide path preparation by five different path finders. Materials and Methods. The study was conducted on 100 S-shaped canal simulator blocks. Glide path was prepared in five groups including (1) Scout RaCe (#10 and #15, 0.02), (2) One G (#14, 0.03), (3) PathFile (#13 and #16, 0.02), (4) GPS (#15, 0.03), and (5) K file (#15, 0.02) (Control group). The first four groups were NiTi rotary instruments, while the last group was a stainless steel hand file. The aforementioned files were used after canal negotiation by a #10 stainless steel hand file. Before- and after-preparation photos were taken and were superimposed in Adobe PhotoShop CC 2019. Transportation measurements were conducted in Digimizer. Absolute canal transportation was calculated at 10 cross-sections. Intergroup and intragroup data analysis were conducted using one-way and repeated measures ANOVA tests, respectively, in SPSS 26.0. The significance level was set to 0.05. Results. Although K file led to significantly more transportation in the apical and middle thirds ( p < 0.001 ), rotary groups were not statistically different. In the coronal third, K files led to significantly more transportation compared to Scout RaCe and PathFile ( p < 0.05 ). Conclusion. Within the limitations of the present study, regardless of the recruited rotary system, glide path preparation using NiTi rotary instruments leads to less canal transportation compared to stainless steel hand files.