A VR Environment for Assessing Dental Surgical Expertise

Traditional methods of dental surgical skills training and assessment are being challenged by complications such as unavailability of expert supervision and the subjective manner of surgical skills assessment. This paper presents a dental surgical skills training system that provides a virtual reality environment with a haptic device for dental students to practice tooth preparation procedures. The system monitors important features of the procedures, objectively assesses the quality of the performed procedure and provides objective feedback on the user’s performance for each stage in the procedure. We evaluated the accuracy of the skill assessment with data collected from novice dental students as well as experienced dentists. The experimental results show high accuracy in classifying users into novice and expert. The evaluation of the system’s generated feedback also indicated a high acceptance rate. Keywords. Surgical skills training and assessment, intelligent tutoring system

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: AIED
• Authors: Phattanapon Rhienmora, Peter Haddawy, Siriwan Suebnukarn, Matthew N. Dailey
• Keywords: AIED 2009, Artificial Intelligence, Dental Surgical Skills, Surgical Skills Assessment, Surgical Skills Training