Haptic-visual display dental simulator 

      During dental surgery operations, haptic sensation is important for the dentist to implement the surgery successfully. Dental students currently use artificial teeth and jaws or visual-only computer simulations to practice the operation. Sensorimotor skill in nature is lost in these training methods. Therefore, haptically enhanced simulation is proposed to provide the sensorimotor involvement needed for dental training.

      Utilizing haptic display technology into medical areas and constructing virtual reality based surgical simulation and training system, it is expected to open a new way to improve the fidelity and decrease the cost of the dental training process.

      Various dental surgeries can be simulated via this system, including Endodontics, Prosthodontics, Periodontics etc. Current results are achieved in following five parts：
       1.Prototype of dental simulator
       With the help of the dental simulator, medical students could perform dental operations include Endodontics, Prosthodontic, Periodontics etc. We use half-silvered mirror to build a Visuo-Haptic system, which could achieve very high visuo-haptic spatial collocation accuracy after applying certain calibration method.
        Dental surgery simulation system integrating haptic and graphical display is established using client server architecture. The client is a computer for haptic and graphic simulation, and the server is the controller of the haptic device. Phantom Desktop is used as the haptic device and the computer communicates with the controller through parallel port. Callback mechanism of GHOST SDK is utilized to enable 1KHz update rate of the haptic rendering loop.

spatial collocation accuracy [download the video]	Haptics-based prototype dental simulator [download the video]

       2.Oral examination
       As the first step, mouth is usually examined for angular stomatitis, glossitis, swollen or bleeding gums, and decayed teeth. A dental mirror is employed to give a better view of the mouth.

Oral examination [download the video]

       3.Prosthodontics simulation
       Prosthodontics includes Teeth drilling and tooth preparation.

Teeth drilling: (from side) [download the video]	Teeth drilling: (from jowl) [download the video]

       4.Endodontics simulation
       Caries detection: In the examination of decrayed tooth, we could diagnose decayed tooth through probing. The tactile sensation of decayed tooth received favourable comment from dental faculties. 
       Tooth profile inspection: An image of the vertical section through the tooth is provided. Distinct stiffness of different tissues and the boundary between them could be clearly felt.

Caries detection [download the video]	Tooth profile inspection [download the video]

      5.Periodontics simulation
     Calculus removal : The operation is required to find all the calculi deposited on the root of all the teeth and remove them.
       Periodontal pocket check : Periodontal diagnosis is needed to find out whether the patient is surffering periodontal disease.

Periodontal pocket check [download the video]	Calculus removal [download the video]

      Further study is focusing on the mouth-cavity-based AR training system to provide the dentist immersive feelings, including:
       •Design of the Haptic & Visual & Audio-Enabled AR Workbench
       •Multi-resolution Modeling and Rendering for Haptic Interaction in complex VE
       •6-Degree-of-Freedom Haptic Rendering
       •Haptic Rendering of Deformable Models
       •GPU based Parallel Algorithm