Quantitative study of force sensing while drilling trabecular bone in oral implant surgery

A survey done recently showed that almost 30 percent of the accidents occurred during oral implant surgery were concerned with the mandibular canal in the trabecular bone region and most of them were related to the drilling process. One of the reasons known is due to the clinicians' lack of knowledge and experience. In order to overcome the problem, through the educational approach, we proposed and developed a new system mainly for dental colleges' students, by focusing on drilling the mandibular trabecular bone. The system comes in the form of an oral implant surgery training simulator that enables student to sense the reaction force during drilling. The developed system was then evaluated by expert clinicians and dental college's students. A total of 8 clinicians and 24 students tested all three samples of drilling force database. The clinicians were asked to describe the drilling force based on a stiffness scale while the students are required to drill two samples first before drilling the third sample. They were asked to sketch the third samples based on the comparison of previous samples. Based on the evaluation done, it was found that the quantification of force sensed during drilling could be derived from the combination of drilling force and speed obtained through the relative value of comparison with the previous or accumulated experience of drilling. The results of this study also indicate that the oral implant surgery training simulator could help students learn the difference of drilling force sense dependent on the bone quality through repeated usage and practices.