Abstract
During surgical treatment of the maxillofacial region, it is important to grasp the 3-dimensional structure, because the area has a physically complex structure consisting of many bones and soft tissue. Conventionally, diagnostic and therapeutical procedures were not commenced prior to rendering a 3-D image from the 2-D image. However, 3D-CT (3-dimensional Computed Tomography) has made it possible to easily monitor any morphologic shape as a 3-D image on a plane. This has heretofore been difficult to determine preoperatively.
So far, there has been a lack of investigation into the precision or accuracy of 3-D image analysis in the maxillofacial area. Therefore, a 3D-CT based reconstruction system was used for preoperative evaluation of mandibular diastrophism. 3-D imaging was carried out on the mandible both empirically and clinically to evaluate measurement accuracy and precision.
In this system, data scanned with a 3D-CT Hi-Speed Advantage (GE Yokokawa Medical Systems) were read by a Power Macintosh 8100/80 AV and the resulting image data were processed with a 3-D rendering software by Vox Blast (Image & Measurement Corp.). The measurement results demonstrated that the 3-D images met accuracy and precision requirements.
In addition, even more accurate measurements became possible by attaching markers to the skin surface of the maxillofacial area while scanning the 3D-CT images, which is an index of the reproductibility of this procedure.
