Evaluation of virtual handles for dental implant manipulation in virtual reality implant planning procedure

Abstract

Purpose: Many surgical complications can be prevented by careful operation planning and preoperative evaluation of the anatomical features. Virtual dental implant planning in three-dimensional stereoscopic virtual reality environment has advantages over three-dimensional projections on two-dimensional screens. In the virtual environment, the anatomical areas of the body can be assessed and interacted with in six degrees-of-freedom. Our aim was to make a preliminary evaluation of how professional users perceive the use of the virtual environment on their field.

Methods: We prepared a novel implementation of a virtual dental implant planning system and conducted a small-scale user study with four dentomaxillofacial radiologists to evaluate the usability of direct and indirect interaction in a planning task.

Results: We found that all four participants ranked direct interaction, planning the implant placement without handles, to be better than the indirect condition where the implant model had handles.

Conclusion: The radiologists valued the three-dimensional environment for three-dimensional object manipulation even if usability issues of the handles affected the feel of use and the evaluation results. Direct interaction was seen as easy, accurate, and natural.

Keywords: 3D imaging; Dental implant; Virtual dental implant planning; Virtual reality.

Fig. 1

An implant without handles (left) and with handles (right). The implant could be moved by either grabbing the body or (in the second condition) also by the handles

Fig. 2

A virtual implant planning tool user with Oculus Quest 2 HMD and controllers

Fig. 3

Distance between the two implants that each participant was setting into the same model (for two different conditions)

Fig. 4

Distances of the final implant positions to the mean position computed from final positions. Connected markers on each figure are by the same participant doing the two conditions

Fig. 5

Evaluation results. A line connects the evaluations by the same participant for both conditions