Comparative study between conventional and cone beam CT-synthesized half and total skull cephalograms

Objectives

The aim of this study was to compare cephalometric measurements obtained from conventional cephalograms with total and half-skull synthesized cone beam CT (CBCT) cephalograms.

Methods

Cephalometric analyses of 30 clinically symmetric patients were conducted by a calibrated examiner on conventional and CBCT-synthesized cephalograms (total, right and left). Reproducibility was investigated using the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC). The Bland–Altman analysis was used to assess the agreement of the measurements from each factor obtained by conventional, total, right and left CBCT-synthesized cephalograms.

Results

The ICC was above 0.9 for most of the 40 cephalometric factors analysed, revealing similar levels of reproducibility. When the measurements obtained from conventional and CBCT-synthesized cephalograms were compared, the Bland–Altman analysis showed a strong agreement between them.

Conclusions

Half-skull CBCT-synthesized cephalograms offer the same diagnostic performance and equivalent reproducibility in terms of cephalometric analysis as observed in conventional and total CBCT-synthesized cephalograms.