Floating norms as a means to describe individual skeletal patterns.

An adequate analysis of the skeletal pattern is essential since a considerable amount of dental compensation can mask the severity of a malocclusion. Disagreement prevails over the standards that should be used to judge the individual values. The paper describes a method of analyzing the skeletal pattern of a patient on an individualized basis. Rather than relating the individual cephalometric values to population means the method employs standards derived from the individual facial type (floating norms). The associations between the basic cephalometric variables can be derived from a box-like graphical representation that is based on the correlations between the different variables. It is thereby an improvement of the 'box' that has been used in the Bergen Technique.