Case Study
Odontology
Unifractal supporting the training of our future dentists
During the past year we have implemented and tested Unifractal at the Department of Clinical dentistry at the University of Tromsø (UiT). There was a great demand for a system to support the training of students in equipment and procedures, before, after and during lectures. This implied lecture preparation, skill refreshment, the general use of equipment as well as guidance for the students while performing procedures on prosthetic training pieces.
It all started with a challenge in image recognition
Associate Professor of Medical Biology, Qalibi Khan, approached Unifractal in the need of a support system that could help him in his anatomy course at the Odontology studies at UiT. The problem faced by the faculty is that there are a lot of students and only a few teachers available during the anatomy class. Qalbi dreamed of a software that could distinguish between teeth using image recognition.
Our hypothesis was that we could distinguish between molars and premolars using a big enough data set. Qalbi brought along two student champions, Matias Marjala and Oliver Ertsås, and they did the work of making huge datasets of teeth. In total we had 2 molars and 2 premolars with a total dataset of 10 000 images. Using over 200 human teeth for our datasets, the results were positive, and we are moving forward to continue our research over the next year.
Preparing for the clinic with Unifractal
Unifractal is now being used in UiT’s clinical dentistry training clinic together with Jukka Leinonen, associate professor in cariology. Jukka has applied microlearning, creating and showing the clinical procedures to the students during his lectures. By sharing the content on our platform Jukka has been able to easily structure and distribute the content to his students and the students have been able to watch the content in preparation for lectures as well as support when working independently with procedures in the clinic.
By sharing the content on our platform Jukka has been able to easily structure and distribute the content to his students and the students have been able to watch the content in preparation for lectures as well as support when working independently with procedures in the clinic.
Exploring effects in other disciplines
Napat Bolstad, Associate Professor of Oral and Facial Radiology at UiT has been instrumental for us to get Unifractal implemented at the department of clinical dentistry. We started our collaboration at the end of summer 2020 and we have had good progress since. Napat started using Unifractal at her lectures this year, after creating her content early 2021. By collaborating with us to create short videos of the general radiology equipment as well as the procedures, she has seen that the use has given her students more confidence in training and introduction to new subjects.
Unifractal is a timesaver for both students and teachers
Back at the clinical training, student champions Matias and Oliver made data sets of the clinical equipment for recognition and recorded short videos for their use. Both the faculty and the Unifractal team have seen a huge value in promoting student to student teaching, giving academic value both to the content creators and the students watching the content. After the students have made the short format videos, the responsible teacher evaluates the videos to ensure the academic validity of the content.
When we asked Matias and Oliver about what value they think Unifractal can bring to the teachers and students they said:
«It's a much better use of our time! With Unifractal, both supervisors and students can save time. It's great for introduction to new subjects. The teachers, don't have to answer the same questions several times.»