Development of virtual patient model for maxillofacial palpation training using Meshless method

For dental therapy, a dentist often touches a patient face in order to identify the causes of pains such as a tumor and/or cancer. Although the importance of maxillofacial palpation has been recognized, practical training with a dental patient has not been conducted for taking care of the safety of the patient in dental school. The training of therapeutic planning with an advising doctor would be effective to enhance the quality of dental therapy. Then, this study has developed a virtual training system for maxillofacial palpation which can be utilized in dental education. In this study, we first took a multi-slice CT data from a human head mannequin in order to obtain the shape data of a virtual patient model. This study adopted Meshless Method (MLM) to construct the dynamic model of the virtual patient model. In the experimental results using a haptic interface, PHANToM Omni, the parameters of MLM influenced the surface deformation of the virtual patient model. This paper finally discussed the availability of MLM for the virtual training system and clarified the current issues that should be solved to utilize the system in dental education.