Georgia Institute of Technology
and
Medical College of Georgia
BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH AND EDUCATION PROGRAM
For all dental students as well as dentists seeking re-licensure, there is a requirement for significant pre-clinical experience prior to initiating patient practice. This experience has traditionally been provided by in-class demonstrations, the use of experimental animals, and work with teeth extracted from cadavers or provided as either plaster or plastic replicas. However, changing oral disease patterns and increasingly limited access to animals and extracted teeth have significantly curtailed these traditional education approaches. The result has been something of a crisis in dental education that has been exacerbated by the public's demands that pre-clinical training use techniques and instruments of increasingly greater sophistication. Concurrent with this situation have been rapid developments in computer technologies that enable realistic interactive simulation. Under a collaborative project involving the Medical College of Georgia and the Georgia Institute of Technology, researchers are applying virtual reality technology to the critical issue of dental education. The goal is to develop a "proof-of-concept" simulation that will provide visual and tactile representations to be used in interactive training for endodontic procedures.
Click to download images of Endodontic training
