Haptic modeling and experimental validation for interactive endodontic simulation

Abstract

To facilitate training of endodontic operations, we have developed an interactive virtual environment to simulate endodontic shaping. This paper presents methodologies for haptic modeling, display and validation of endodontic shaping. We first investigate the forces generated in the course of shaping operations and discuss the challenging issues in their modeling. Based on the special properties and constraints associated with both pulpal tissue and endodontic files, we propose a haptic model to simulate endodontic shaping operations, which is a smoothed particle based dynamic model derived for the pulpal tissue coupled with a finite element model for the endodontic files. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the proposed model has been validated by experimental results through a novel robotic endodontic measurement system