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A Virtual-Reality-Based Dental Simulator for Endodontics with Automated Formative Feedback
Advancements in virtual reality (VR) and haptic technology are transforming the landscape of medical and dental education, offering new avenues for safe, immersive, and repeatable training experiences. Within dentistry, endodontics presents unique challenges for preclinical education due to anatomic...
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| Format: | Thesis |
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AUC Knowledge Fountain
2026
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| Summary: | Advancements in virtual reality (VR) and haptic technology are transforming the landscape of medical and dental education, offering new avenues for safe, immersive, and repeatable training experiences. Within dentistry, endodontics presents unique challenges for preclinical education due to anatomical complexity, limited access to extracted teeth, ethical concerns, and the shortcomings of conventional plastic models. Despite endodontics specific plastic teeth being available, they fall short of replicating the hardness of real extracted teeth, are relatively costly compared to generic plastic teeth, and are ultimately a disposable item which makes them inadequate as a sustainable long-term solution. Extracted teeth do a much better job in terms of drilling sensation, although there exist ethical and hygienic concerns around the practice of reusing extracted teeth for preclinical training. Moreover, extracted teeth usually are in short supply and with limited variability in terms of anatomy and mostly diminished structure. This thesis addresses these issues through the development of a VR-based dental simulator focused on endodontic access cavity preparation, delivering both authentic anatomical modeling and automated, objective feedback. The system integrates detailed tooth anatomy segmented from Cone Beam Computed Tomography (CBCT) scans, real-time mesh deformation via a voxelization and marching cubes workflow, and a haptic feedback device to recreate the tactile sensations essential for dental procedures. Performance optimization strategies, such as mesh chunking, lightmapping, and dynamic input options, ensure smooth, immersive experiences adaptable to users’ needs and hardware variations. The simulator’s standout feature is its automated formative feedback mechanism, which compares student performance voxel-by voxel to expert benchmarks, generating both numerical scores and location-specific, descriptive comments that promote self-guided skill improvement. User studies involving undergraduate dental students, most new to VR, demonstrated high engagement and perceived value, particularly in terms of independence, realism, and clarity of assessment. Areas for further development, such as enhanced anatomical detail and differentiated tactile response, were also identified through structured questionnaires and open-ended feedback. Through the questionnaire, the students rated the user friendliness of the simulator at 3.69/4.00, the visual and auditorial accuracies and immersion at 2.70/4.00, the haptics and tactile feel at 2.28/4.00, the scoring feedback and presentation at 3.56/4.00, and lastly their perception of its long-term effectiveness in skill acquisition at 3.17/4.00. The findings support the viability and significant benefits of immersive, automated VR simulators in dental education and their potential to enable objective, scalable, and resource-efficient training. |
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