Did the hand drawn cephalometric tracing technique for orthognathic surgery planning say its last word? Objective and subjective evaluation.

The aim of this study was to evaluate the accuracy and reliability of the hand drawn cephalometric tracing technique for predicting the soft-tissue profile and their association with subjective evaluation. Distances from 8 soft-tissue landmarks to X and Y reference lines were determined on planned versus actual cephalometric profiles of 30 patients. The subjective evaluation was assessed by comparing pairs of related versus unrelated profiles by professional and nonprofessionals.The accuracy of all linear measurements was high. Mean differences were not significant for all landmarks, except for stomion on the horizontal axis (P < 0.01). Mean difference of similarity scores between related versus unrelated profiles was significant (P < 0.01). The higher objective distance over all cephalometric landmarks was associated with lower subjective similarity scores (P < 0.01).This study has demonstrated that the hand drawn cephalometric tracing technique can be accurately and reliably executed and that these results were positively associated with subjective evaluation.