The use of the endoscope in endodontic surgery: A systematic review

BACKGROUND: A systematic review of clinical studies with at least one year of follow-up was done to assess the success rate of endodontic surgery including endoscopy for magnification and illumination. MATERIAL AND METHODS: Five electronic databases were searched, including MEDLINE (via PubMed), Embase, Web of Science, Scopus and the Cochrane Library of the Cochrane Collabora-tion (CENTRAL). There were no language restrictions, and the search covered the period up to October 2019. The risk of bias was evaluated with the Cochrane Collaboration tool for randomized clinical trials and the ROBINS-I tool for non-randomized studies of inter-ventions. RESULTS: From the 278 initially identified titles, finally 2 randomized controlled trials and 3 non-randomized studies met the inclusion criteria. All the included studies analyzed the success rate of endodontic surgery performed with the help of endoscope for magnifica-tion and illumination. The risk of bias was high for allocation sequence concealment and blinding of participants and personnel in the randomized controlled trials. The nonran-domized studies showed limitations in terms of confounding bias and blinding of outcome assessment. Endodontic surgery with the help of an endoscope is associated with high success rates (88.9-94.9%). CONCLUSIONS: The endoscope was associated with high success rates of endodontic sur-gery in the included studies. Future studies on this topic are warranted, due to the meth-odological issues and the scarce number of randomized clinical trials. Key words:Endodontic surgery, magnification, endoscope, success.