Objectives: The Iowa Dental Surgical Simulator (IDSS) is a haptic (force feedback) simulator that is designed to teach the “touch” of dentistry to dental students. All dental students must acquire the ability to determine if the gap between a tooth and dental crown is clinically acceptable (< 25µm). The goal of this research study was to simulate the haptics of crown margin detection and test its validity with dental experts prior to its use with students. Methods: The Phantom Premium by SenseAble Technologies was the haptic simulator selected for this. The Iowa Probe was used to measure the forces exerted during dental procedures. VRML 2.0 was used to build the tooth morphology models. Four models were developed (vertical gap, horizontal gap, step edge and slope edge) each in three different sizes (25µm, 50µm, 100µm). Five dental faculty explored each of the twelve models. They were not informed of the type or size of each gap that they were probing. They were asked if each gap that they “felt” was clinically acceptable and to estimate its size between 0µm and 150µm. Open ended comments regarding were recorded. Results: The dentists' ability to discriminate between the differences in gap sizes was insignificant. Also the horizontal and vertical gap models allowed the cursor to travel too far between the blocks which would not occur in an actual patient experience. Conclusion: Although the position resolution of the Phantom is 20µm, the dentists' inability to correctly discern a gap suggests that the device is not capable of representing geometries as small as 25µm. This may be due to the Nyquist sampling theory that predicts that a device must have a sampling resolution twice as small as the signal to be presented. Thus, alternative haptic devices need to be explored prior to use with dental students.

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