New formula to objectively evaluate skeletal maturation using lateral cephalometric radiographs

Abstract

The aim of this study was to establish two new formulas for objectively evaluating skeletal maturation of cervical vertebrae in female and male Brazilian subjects using lateral cephalometric radiographs. The sample included 128 girls and 110 boys, aged 7.0 to 15.9 years, from the files of the Oral Radiology Clinic, Piracicaba Dental School, University of Campinas (Unicamp), SP, Brazil. The cervical vertebral bodies of C3 and C4 were traced and measured and regression formulas were developed in order to determine cervical vertebral bone age. Another sample of lateral teleradiographs and hand-wrist radiographs of 55 girls and 54 boys (aged 7.0 to 15.9 years) was used to verify the reliability of the developed regression formulas, as compared with bone age assessed using the Tanner et al.15 (2001) Method (TW3) in hand-wrist radiographs. The analysis of both the boys and girls data (ANOVA) showed no statistical difference between cervical vertebral bone age, bone age, and chronological age, indicating that these formulas can be used in this population (p=0.5721 and p=0.6007 for girls and boys, respectively). Female cervical vertebral bodies of C3 and C4 increased in an accelerated manner from 10 to 13 years. Analysis of the male sample showed that C3 measurements increased in an accelerated manner from 12 to 15 years. The C4 measurements, however, did not increase at all. Using cervical vertebral bone age it is possible to evaluate skeletal maturation objectively in cephalometric radiographs.

Measurement and comparison of bracket transfer accuracy of five indirect bonding techniques

“…[15][16][17][18] To assess the accuracy of each technique, bracket coordinate value differences for each tooth between working and patient model pairs (n 5 5) were analyzed using paired t-tests. For technique comparisons, analyses were conducted for all teeth grouped, anterior teeth, posterior teeth, and left and right sides of the arch using analysis of variance followed by Tukey post hoc comparisons.…”

Cervical vertebral maturation as a biologic indicator of skeletal maturity

“…40,43 Caution should be taken in the application of the results presented in this SR. Most of the studies investigating the use of cervical vertebral radiographic analysis of skeletal maturation did not report any kind of randomization, blinding, and sample size calculation.…”

A practical formula for determining growth

“…Age estimation using cervical vertebrae has been increasingly used to assess skeletal maturation instead of the hand-wrist bone age in recent years (1,(6)(7)(8)(12)(13)(14)(15)(16)(17)(18). Scoring the developmental stages of twenty bones in the hand and wrist region could be noted as a time-consuming endeavor.…”

“…Although a correlation between the changes in cervical vertebrae and growth was reported (12,13,15), the reproducibility of skeletal age evaluation based on similarity between the radiographs and the defined images was found to be disappointingly low (26). Mito et al (16) and Caldas et al (17,18) suggested using methods depending on formulas instead of radiograph similarity for achieving objective results. Therefore, in this study, a formula was developed to easily and objectively calculate the cervical vertebral age.…”

“…However, this method is limited by the subjective evaluation of growth, because it mainly depends on finding similarity between the radiographs of the subjects and the defined images. Therefore, Mito et al (16) derived a formula for cervical vertebral bone age in girls, and Caldas et al (17,18) developed two formulas in Brazilian subjects to determine reliability. Although these studies have simplified the maturation prediction process, to our knowledge, no previous studies have evaluated a single formula for both genders in Caucasian subjects.…”