Journal of Advances in Medicine and Medical Research

Digital facebow transfer and virtual articulators have moved occlusal rehabilitation from a predominantly mechanical analogue of the patient towards a multimodal digital representation that can combine dentition, facial references, interarch relationships and, increasingly, mandibular motion. This transition is clinically attractive because the same spatial information can support diagnosis, restorative design, laboratory communication and computer-aided manufacture. Yet the term digital facebow encompasses materially different approaches, and evidence for virtual articulation is frequently extrapolated from controlled laboratory accuracy to complex biological function. This critical narrative review evaluates the conceptual basis, transfer modalities, accuracy, static and dynamic articulation, clinical translation, methodological limitations and research priorities of contemporary digital facebow and virtual articulator workflows. Literature from 1 January 2000 to 27 June 2026 was examined through multidisciplinary scholarly sources, with emphasis on verified peer-reviewed studies, comparative investigations and systematic reviews. The evidence is strongest for static virtual articulation and maxillary spatial transfer when stable dentate landmarks, well-controlled registrations and validated software are available. Facial scanning, calibrated photography, cone-beam computed tomography and hybrid scan-body workflows can all produce clinically useful spatial records, but their errors are device-, reference-plane-, algorithm- and protocol-dependent. Smartphone-based approaches improve accessibility but currently show greater variability than higher-grade scanning systems in several experiments. Dynamic virtual articulation is technically feasible, and controlled in vitro work can reproduce programmed mechanical movements closely, but patient-specific motion capture and functional validation remain less mature than static registration. Across the literature, the central limitation is not a single device error but cumulative uncertainty across scanning, registration, reference selection, interocclusal records and software simulation. Digital facebow transfer should therefore be regarded as a data-integration strategy rather than an automatic replacement for clinical judgement. The most defensible near-term role is selective, complexity-matched use within occlusal rehabilitation, accompanied by verification of the definitive prosthesis intraorally. Future progress depends on standardised accuracy metrics, interoperable data structures, independent clinical validation and outcome studies that measure adjustment burden, complications and patient-centred benefit rather than geometric agreement alone.