Interactive haptic simulation of tooth extraction by a constraint-based haptic rendering approach

Tooth extraction is a typical process in clinical dental operations. Interactive haptic simulation of tooth extraction may provide a useful tool for dental students to learn the correct force pattern and tool posture to accomplish a safe tooth extraction. In this paper, we extended our previous configuration-based optimization approach to simulate the six Degree-of-Freedom (DoF) haptic interaction process of tooth extraction. A multi-phase model was proposed to simulate progressive changes of the connection strength between the target tooth and its surrounding gingiva. An energy accumulation model was proposed to compute the small-scale rotation and translation of the target tooth under active forces from a dental forceps. The proposed approach could support training of coordinated force and motion control skill required for tooth extraction. Experimental results validated the stability and efficiency of the proposed approach to simulate various force-displacement profiles for extracting diversified target teeth.