Virtual reality and haptics for dental surgery: a personal review

Virtual reality and haptics are novel human-machine interaction technologies which have shown a good application potential in many fields such as medical, entertainment, manufacturing, and education areas in the last 20 years. Especially for dental surgery simulation and training, they provide a new and low-cost approach whereby dentists can practice procedures as many times as they want at no incremental cost and training can take place anywhere. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of virtual reality and haptics for dental surgery simulation and training. Some new ideas and recent research progress are investigated, the major research efforts and their typical systems are introduced, and the involved major research issues are summarized, and finally future trends and conclusions are discussed.