An Ontological Approach for Dental Extraction Decision Making and Knowledge Dissemination – A Pilot Study for Dental Extraction Forceps

Tooth extraction is one of the most usual surgical procedure in the field of dental. Not having proper knowledge of tooth and extraction instruments may cause too much complexity in extraction procedure or even some damages to patients’ jaws. Mainly when using extraction forceps, the proper forceps should be used according to the teeth and the situation. So, it is very much important to have a sound knowledge of the instruments to be used, especially on extraction forceps. So, the knowledge of extraction forceps should be disseminated properly. After identifying this need, as a first stage, we gathered the information regarding the dental extraction forceps from the experts in the field. Then we started developing ontology as a second stage. Finally, the Knowledge Management (KM) Portal, which helps to share the knowledge of dental extraction, was developed. Since the quality and the accuracy of the ontology is the key in this research, it was evaluated and validated by using inbuilt FaCT++ 1.6.5 reasoner, online validator OOPS! and ontology experts as an iterative approach. It was also evaluated by using ontology non-experts in the final stage as an application-based (field test) evaluation. A questionnaire survey was conducted to the users to evaluate the KM portal (i.e., ontology). The results show that 85% of them are agreed and strongly agreed on the usefulness of the system. We confidently believe that our novel approach on dental extraction forceps KM portal can support all the dental related personnel to improve the knowledge and helpful in learning practices. Our next step is to model the ontology for the whole extraction process.