One common negative aspect of clear aligner treatment is represented by the loss of fitting when complex movements such as extrusion, rotations, and generic root movements are planned. In case of loss of tracking during aligner treatment, clinicians could use auxiliaries such as buttons and elastics or elastic chains in combination with aligners to recover the proper position of teeth. This approach is useful to avoid treatment time increase due to a new scan and a consequent new set of aligners, but this procedure increases patient’s compliance requests, leaving the correction of misfitting to the cooperation. For this reason, fixed conventional appliances can represent a solution, but it is difficult to combine brackets and wires with aligners because of the dimensions of the fixed appliance and the poor esthetics. An alternative, effective, smart, and non-compliant solution could be represented by a mini-tube appliance, in combination with aligners.
Greco et al. (Wed,) studied this question.