Abstract:

Dental students must have beside the theoretical knowledge, a lot of visual and practical abilities. They should be able to cope with varied concrete situations and to apply a combination of good theoretical cases understanding with first class psychomotor skills. These needs have been quenched in the last years by the advances in Information and Communications Technology (ICT), which allowed the creation and usage of 3D dental/oral system models. They are included in the e-learning systems for dentistry, bringing new ways to obtain learning, practical training and evaluation compared to the classical education. The usage is both theoretical, with the inclusion for visualization in atlases, exploration models, surgical planning, e-learning platforms etc., and practical with the inclusion in Virtual Reality interactive training tools or with the creation of 3D printed standard physical models to be used in the practical training.

The 3D models support and improve the quality of teaching by introducing modern information technologies, facilitating the learning of new concepts and increasing the responsiveness and competitiveness among learners. The general prototypes are complemented these days with particular models created digitally or imported from the patient cases. They counterpart the classical examples with particular, novel ones, insuring the innovative learning and the capability to respond soundly to novel situations. One of the methods used to obtain these models is using 3D reconstruction from the Cone Beam Computer Tomography (CBCT) data, the current standard in dentistry imaging. The data obtained using the CBCT procedure is in the form of a transversal CT sections stack through the body, stored in Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) format. The regular approach to convert these images into the 3D model of the region of interest comprises image pre-preprocessing, segmentation of the elements in the pre-processed images, alignment or registration of the segmented objects and finally 3D reconstruction of the registered elements. The 3D reconstruction for the dental structure is a difficult problem, with lots of papers treating the subject because of several issues: noisiness and low contrast due to the low amount of radiation, connectivity of the segments, bad positioning, section shape changing and low resolution. The paper describes the exploiting of 3D models in dentistry learning because of the domain importance, complexity and needfulness. The reconstruction from CBCT data is analyzed as one the most important methods to obtain 3D models corresponding to real cases and the benefits of these models in dentistry learning are shown.

Keywords:

Dentistry learning, Cone Beam Computer Tomography, Virtual Reality, 3D models, 3D printing.