A virtual reality environment for enhanced oral implantology

The quality of clinical decision making is limited by the performance of human cognitive processing of complex visual information. In the field of oral implantology, treatment planning is still based on the holistic interpretation and mental reconstruction of cross sectional 2d-image data. This surpasses widely human cognitive competence and hampers treatment planning in three dimensions that are essential in implantology. To overcome these problems, a virtual reality environment for enhanced treatment planning in oral implantology is presented, which provides a fully three-dimensional perception of an individual clinical situation. It enables the clinician to perceive and handle the objects of her work in a virtual world as needed for the task of diagnosis and treatment. Human visual decoding effort is thus reduced, and estimating the real position and orientation of implants during planning is enabled in any direction. Immersive three-dimensional perception is achieved by hybrid stereoscopic rendering techniques combined with large screen projections. The virtual world in which treatment planning takes place allows the clinician to move and interact with the individual anatomy simultaneously with three degrees of freedom. A set of virtual tools enables the clinician to perform a virtual treatment "in advance." The design and placement of implants, as it is interactively controlled by the clinician, is simulated in real-time. Thus the results of actions become immediately visible and provide visible feedback for interactive adjustment. In addition, the presented virtual reality environment for oral implant treatment planning includes algorithms for detection of inappropriate treatment in the concerned bone regions, according to the current design of the implant. These algorithms take both the individual properties of a patient's bone and the type of implants used into account.