Digitalization era of dental education: A systematic review

Abstract

Background. Dental education is taking its share of the digitalization of the world. Therefore, it is of value to assess the use of the digital dental education system, especially in the undergraduate period. Objectives. This systematic review concisely evaluated the use of augmented and virtual reality in pre-clinical dental education. Material and methods. The PICOS (Population, Intervention, Comparison, Outcome, and Study design) search strategy was used with the keywords ‘e-learning’, ‘virtual reality’ and ‘preclinic simulation’ to search the PubMed, PubMed Central, Web of Science, and Scopus databases. Results. A total of 1,774 articles were found, and 45 articles were reviewed. The level of bias in the studies was also calculated. The studies were divided into 3 main groups: computer-assisted learning (C-AL); augmented reality-assisted learning (AR-AL); and virtual reality-assisted learning (VR-AL). Augmented and virtual reality are steadily evolving, and are increasingly being used in education and healthcare. Conclusions. The evaluated technological applications enable the visualization of medical information and provide clear feedback during the learning process with increased security and reliability; thus, digital simulation systems can be used to enhance students’ abilities in dentistry.