Preliminary evaluation of a virtual reality dental simulation system on drilling operation

Abstract

Abstract.To evaluate the fidelity of the iDental system and investigate its utility and performance on simulated drilling operations, user studies consisting of objective and subjective evaluations were performed. A voxel-based drilling simulation sub-system in the iDental system was employed for evaluation. Twenty participants were enrolled to take part in the experiments and were divided into two groups: novice and resident. A combined evaluation method including objective and subjective methods was employed. The objective evaluation included two dental drilling tasks: caries removal operation and pulp chamber opening operation. In the subjective method, participants were required to complete a questionnaire to evaluate the fidelity of the system after the operation task. Based on the structured global assessment scales in the questionnaire, the average subjective evaluation scores of the proposed metrics were greater than 4.5, demonstrating that the system operated above medium fidelity. Dentists expressed great interest and positive attitudes toward the potential of the iDental system. The objective evaluation data including time spent and the volume of removed healthy and carious tissue were obtained. Although no significant differences could be found between the two groups, the volume of removed caries and the depth of pulp chamber insertion manifested small standard deviations. Evaluation results illustrated that dentists were willing to use the virtual reality training system. Several future research topics were identified, including increasing the task difficulty, improving the system fidelity and introducing appropriate finger rest points.

A Scoring System for Assessing Learning Progression of Dental Students’ Clinical Skills Using Haptic Virtual Workstations

“…4 However, many of the previous evaluations of such systems have been short-term, 5 involved small student cohorts, 9 were limited to measuring attitudes rather than impact on learning gains, 9,11 and rarely involved the integrated use of virtual simulators over a sustained period. 4 Some educators have been positive about the perceived educational value of VRS systems, 8,[11][12][13] whereas other studies found that students felt they did not hold an advantage over traditional teaching methods. 4,14 Such conclusions about VRS system efficacy based only on students' perceptions have limited value because they do not progressively record the impact of the activity on students' learning of specific clinical skills.…”

Preclinical assessment methodology using a dental simulator during dental students’ first and third years

“…Professors play key roles in skills acquisition by dentistry students. The development of students' clinical abilities while students obtain a dentistry degree has always been performed with the support of preclinical practice [4][5][6][7][8]. The latter serves as training for students and assessment of their abilities [5,6,7].…”

“…Preclinical practices in the Simodont Dental Trainer (SDT) and MB are complementary [8][9][10]. Of note, practice in MB can be evaluated quantitatively, allowing the teacher to measure a student's development both over an academic year or throughout the training [2,3,[5][6][7][8]10]. Importantly, practice using the SDT provides error percentages for each parameter of practice, without numerical evaluation [3].…”

Clinical Skills Acquisition: Rethinking Assessment Using a Virtual Haptic Simulator

“…However, even though there is a growing use of haptic (sense of touch) technologies within many undergraduate healthcare programmes (e.g. see de Boer et al 2015;San Diego et al 2012;Quinn et al 2003), there have been few large scale quantitative studies published to date of the relationship between students' psychomotor skills and haptic learning environments which are becoming widely used in the health sciences in higher education (Bakr et al 2014;Urbankova and Engebretson 2011;Wang et al 2015). Consequently, there has been a need for further investigations into the relationship between students' psychomotor skills and their clinical skills development, which is the focus of the study reported in this paper.…”