Purpose: To achieve high plaque removal around peri-implant tissues, noninvasive cleaning methods that guarantee the long-term success and survival of titanium implants should be established. This systematic review aimed to systematically evaluate in vitro investigations assessing different treatment modalities to decontaminate titanium surfaces, with special focus on the most effective cleaning procedures.

Materials and methods: PRISMA guidelines were adopted in an electronic search conducted through MEDLINE, Scopus, and Google Scholar databases to identify studies on mechanical, chemical, or laser decontamination modalities up to November 2019.

Results: The search resulted in 326 articles; after removing duplicates and reading titles, abstracts, and full texts, 38 articles were ultimately processed for data extraction. Mechanical decontamination provided better results in comparison to laser and chemical procedures. Among mechanical modalities, air abrasion showed the best cleaning effectiveness. Conversely, upon comparison of the chemical methods, chlorhexidine demonstrated comparable results with all tested substances and even with photodynamic therapy. Among different lasers, the results showed that the diode was more promising compared with the other tested lasers.

Conclusion: This review demonstrated that there is still no consensus on which technique performs better. However, mechanical decontamination yielded more favorable results than laser and chemical methods. This aspect would support the hypothesis that decontamination procedures adopted in a combination fashion, which includes mechanical procedures, may provide better clinical results than when used alone.