Skeletodental Diagnosis Using a Geometric Morphometric Approach

Abstract

In orthodontics and maxillofacial surgery, dentoeskeletal diagnosis is essential for treatment planning. Traditionally, this diagnosis is carried out using cephalometric analysis based on the comparison of distances and angle measurements. While this method successfully discriminates within group extreme types of malocclusions, it usually does not distinguish the intermediate ones, which leads to different diagnoses for the same phenotype. Moreover, the linear nature of cephalometric data does not allow to partition shape and size components. In order to study the variation of dentoskeletal pattern in Chilean population, in the present study standard methods of geometric morphometrics to a sample of 150 lateral telerradiographs of classes I, II division 1 and III were applied. We found that classes I, II and III show statistically significant differences associated, to a greater degree, with a sagittal maxillo-mandibular relationship, and to a lesser degree with a vertical growth pattern, allowing positive discrimination of intermediate phenotypes. We conclude that tools of geometric morphometrics constitute a complementary and effective approach to address unresolved problems associated with conventional cephalometric analysis.