Comparison between 3D and 2D Cephalometric Analysis of 200 Thai Patients

Cephalometric radiography is an important diagnostic tool in orthodontics and craniomaxillofacial surgery. Conventionally, cephalometric variables are measured using two-dimensional cephalometric analysis on either lateral or frontal analysis, which could lead to erroneous results in skull measurements due to inherent shortcomings of 2D cephalometric analysis which could not take the combined result of lateral and frontal measurement into account. This paper presented the three-dimensional cephalometric analysis on DICOM data from I-CAT CT cone-beam machine. The averaged values and standard deviations of 44 cephalometric angularand 30 cephalometric linear-measurements were determined from CT radiographs of 200 Thai non-severe patients, which 100 men and 100 women. DICOM data from the CT had been transformed into 3D data using Simplant Master and performed 3D cephalometric Analysis using Simplant CMF from Materialise. The result of cephalometric analysis in 3D has been compared with the 2D cephalometric analysis which showed that 3D analysis results yielded 2 sections which were either significantly different or not significantly different results comparing to the 2D analysis on using the same skull. Cephalometric analysis results in 3D will be used as a set of average or Thai patients in the Clinical Ceph3D services as requested by dentists and researches with interests on cephalometric analysis and anthropology with focus on Thai subjects.