Providing Objective Feedback on Skill Assessment in a Dental Surgical Training Simulator

Dental students devote several years to the acquisition of sufficient psychomotor skills to prepare them for entry-level dental practice. Traditional methods of dental surgical skills training and assessment are being challenged by the complications such as the lack of real-world cases, unavailability of expert supervision and the subjective manner of surgical skills assessment. To overcome these challenges, we developed a dental training system that provides a VR environment with a haptic device for dental students to practice tooth preparation procedures. The system monitors important features of the procedure, objectively assesses the quality of the performed procedure using hidden Markov models, and provides objective feedback on the user’s performance for each stage in the procedure. Important features for characterizing the quality of the procedure were identified based on interviews with experienced dentists. We evaluated the accuracy of the skill assessment with data collected from novice dental students as well as experienced dentists. We also evaluated the quality of the system’s feedback by asking a dental expert for comments. The experimental results show high accuracy in classifying users into novice and expert, and the evaluation indicated a high acceptance rate for the generated feedback.