Improving facial esthetics of our patients is of great importance to orthodontists. An individual’s facial appearance is one of their most obvious characteristics and has profound social significance. Tooth movement and proper positioning of the teeth to ensure favorable facial changes and to avoid unfavorable changes should be the goal in the orthodontist’s mind.
Standard color photographs and radiographic views (PA and cephalometric X-ray films) remain a principle adjunct to orthodontic care. Various methods of soft-tissue assessment have evolved; however, none of those method has been reported adequately enough to describe the face without depending upon anatomically variable intracranial landmarks as reference points or upon the facial soft tissues themselves. In addition, the most important problems are difficulties in standardizing these images. The main disadvantages are the poor resolution and the inconsistent magnification of the X-ray images and the fact that the landmarks identified on the soft tissue profile do not correspond with those identified from radiographic examination. These unavoidable disadvantages make it hard to analyze and compare the post-treatment outcomes directly.
At present, 2-dimensional (2D) assessments of lateral cephalograms is the main method to investigate the effects of orthodontic treatment on the face. However, patients tend to assess their appearance from either a frontal or a three-quarter profile view, rarely from the sagittal view as recorded in the 2D lateral cephalograms. Three-dimensional (3D) imaging has developed greatly in the last two decades and has been applied to orthodontic treatment. In 3D imaging, a set of anatomical data are collected using diagnostic imaging equipment, processed by a computer and displayed on a 2D monitor to give the illustration of depth. Depth perception causes the image to appear in 3D.
This study was to compare the 3D effects on the lower face immediate changes after the first step (direct bonding system, DBS) of orthodontic treatment. Laser scanner (Minolta VIVID 910) was used for capturing the facial images before and after DBS of each patient. The collected data were processed and compared with the Rapidforn 2006 (INUS Korea) reverse engineering software. The great immediate changes of the lower face after DBS were appeared over the peri-oral, chin area and could be measured by the variation directly from the superimposed images. But the immediate changes of the lower face after DBS were not in accordance with the thickness of the brackets.
The 3D laser scanning for capturing the facial profiles is a simple and effective tool clinically, because the 3D images can be measured directly from the processing software and easily showed the results of orthodontic treatment to patients. Application of 3D data is expected to increase significantly soon and might eventually replace many conventional orthodontic records which are in use today.
