Construct validity and expert benchmarking of the haptic virtual reality dental simulator

Area of Science:

• Dental Education
• Virtual Reality Simulation
• Surgical Skills Assessment

Background:

• Haptic virtual reality (VR) simulators offer a promising tool for dental education.
• Objective assessment of endodontic skills using VR requires validation and defined expert benchmarks.

Purpose of the Study:

• To establish construct validity of a haptic VR dental simulator.
• To define expert benchmarking criteria for endodontic skills assessment.

Main Methods:

• Thirty-four participants (novices, intermediates, experts) performed endodontic cavity preparations on a haptic VR simulator.
• Tasks varied in difficulty (easy, medium, hard) with ten repetitions each.
• Simulator registered instrument path length; expert assessed error scores.

Main Results:

• Error scores differentiated experts from novices/intermediates in easy and medium modes early in training.
• Instrument path length also showed initial performance differences between groups.
• No significant differences were found between groups by the end of training or in the hard difficulty mode.

Conclusions:

• The haptic VR dental simulator demonstrates construct validity by discriminating between expert and non-expert performance.
• Expert performance metrics (error scores, path length) can establish benchmarking criteria for VR-based dental skills assessment.