Comparison of manual, digital and lateral CBCT cephalometric analyses.

OBJECTIVE

The aim of this study was to compare the reliability of three different methods of cephalometric analysis.

MATERIAL AND METHODS

Conventional pretreatment lateral cephalograms and cone beam computed tomography (CBCT) scans from 50 subjects from a radiological clinic were selected in order to test the three methods: manual tracings (MT), digitized lateral cephalograms (DLC), and lateral cephalograms from CBCT (LC-CBCT). The lateral cephalograms were manually analyzed through the Dolphin Imaging 11.0™ software. Twenty measurements were performed under the same conditions, and retraced after a 30-day period. Paired t tests and the Dahlberg formula were used to evaluate the intra-examiner errors. The Pearson's correlation coefficient and one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) tests were used to compare the differences between the methods.

RESULTS

Intra-examiner reliability occurred for all methods for most of the measurements. Only six measurements were different between the methods and an agreement was observed in the analyses among the 3 methods.

CONCLUSIONS

The results demonstrated that all evaluated methodologies are reliable and valid for scientific research, however, the method used in the lateral cephalograms from the CBCT proved the most reliable.