A clinical study on the reliability of preoperative prediction in orthognathic surgery with the use of computerized cephalometric program

Kim, Ji Hyuck; Park, Young Wook

Abstract

Since the precise preoperative evaluations and plans for the orthognathic surgery are essential to maximize the patient's satisfaction, it is absolutely necessary to have preoperative predictions for postoperative results through adequate preoperative evaluation and diagnosis. Many methods have been tried to have the 'predictions', and one of them is cephalometric tracing and visual surgery with the use of computer program. That kind of method has been recently more and more popularized and frequently applied in the orthognathic surgery and craniofacial surgery, and also a lot of studies for the reliability of the prediction of the computerized method have been performed. But the results of the studies for the reliability are variable. Therefore, in our study, we try to evaluate the reliability of the preoperative prediction in orthognathic surgery with the use of computerized cephalometric program(Quick Ceph(R)). We evaluated the 18 patients who took BSSRO alone or combined with Le Fort I osteotomy, maxillary anterior segmental osteotomy, or genioplasty. First, for all of the patients, preoperative cephalometric lateral views were taken and analyzed by Quick Ceph program, and then treatment plans were decided. Visual surgery was performed as the programed plan, so the preoperative prediction was obtained through the results of the visual surgery. Second, postoperative cephalometric lateral views were taken for each of the patients to obtain the postoperative actual changes(4 months - 16 months after operation ; mean 7 months), and those were analysed by the computer program. Finally, both of the measurements were compared each other and analysed statistically. Conclusively, significant differences were found in lower lip position and pogonion(Pog) landmark. While the differences between vertical positional changes were statistically significant, the differences between horizontal positional changes were not statistically significant.