Accuracy of Static Surgical Guides in Dental Implant Placement: A Short Evidence Overview

Static computer-aided implant surgery (sCAIS) uses a digitally planned, fabricated surgical guide to transfer the planned implant position to the patient. This short overview summarizes what recent systematic reviews and meta-analyses report about the accuracy of static surgical guides, how they compare with free-handed placement and with dynamic or robotic systems, and what is known about how the guide is manufactured (3D printing versus milling). Static guides are consistently reported to place implants more accurately than free-handed placement, a fully guided protocol is reported to outperform a pilot-guided one, and no manufacturing method has yet been shown to be clearly superior. Accuracy depends on the full workflow, not the guide alone. Disclosure: prepared on behalf of Guided Excellence (https://guided4excellence.com), a dental surgical guide laboratory. It summarizes published research only, contains no original clinical data, and is not medical advice. Also available on Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23883350