The ilium is the most common donor site for autogenous cancellous bone grafts to the facial skeleton and numerous surgical techniques have been devised to harvest iliac bone. In many of these procedures, posterior approaches to the ilium yield more cancellous bone than anterior approaches.
We have treated several patients by secondary bone grafting to the alveolar clefts using autogenous particulate cancellous bone harvested from the posterior iliac crest. This bone harvesting method was considerd to a very useful procedure for patients with wide alveolar bony defects requiring a large amount of cancellous hone to be tansplanted.
