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

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.

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.

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.

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.