AR or VR simulators important tools in clinical examination in dentistry in future

With the increase in the elderly population and the economic growth, the concept of oral health gradually increased, and dental and dental health care issues are increasingly important. Due to the high incidence and prevalence of today's global oral diseases, the global market for oral medical equipment in 2016 was $ 23.99 billion, up to 4.0% from 2015. The market was expected to reach $ 29.09 billion by 2020.2015–2020 growth rate was up to 4.7%, coupled with the incidence of the poor than other socio-economic groups. Oral disease has become an important public health problem and promoting the global oral medical market is growing.

The history of dentistry is almost as long as the history of human civilization. With the progress of science and technology, the application of techniques used in dentistry became more and more mature. From the initial, using pliers to remove the tooth, wire to lock loose teeth, and the dental appliance and dental bridge. At the beginning of the 17th and 18th centuries, using tooth filling gradually developed to the initial bone as a denture concept to replace the loose teeth. To use the tooth sets of metal wire and fixed appliance techniques to correct the tooth position. Today, dental expertise is currently used to prevent and treat common oral diseases, namely dental caries and periodontal disease. The field also includes common repair, extraction, implant, root canal therapy and calculus removal.

The researchers found that:

The development of VR or AR is a good tool for our society. Not only applied to the education but also developed in the clinical treatment. We believe that in the future, the VR and AR training and lesson can spread and be applied to every department of dentistry to make the student and PGY train their skill by themselves. And because of the complete education and training, the surgery would decrease the risk and create a safe surgical environment. And in the surgery, the visible can combine the accurate medical images, tracking system, targeting, registration and computation, even the HMD system or AR, to help the physicians execute the surgery. Depending on the physicians' experience and the complete hardware and software, it would build a trustable relationship between the patients and doctors.

Thus, the study concludes that the AR or VR simulators with direct feedback and objective evaluation function may become an important tool in the future of dental OSCE.

Reference:

Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) applied in dentistry by Ta-KoHuang et al. published in The Kaohsiung Journal of Medical Sciences.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.kjms.2018.01.009