Comparison of manual,digital and lateral CBCT cephalometric analyses

Objective: the aim of this study was to compare the reliability of three different methods of cephalometric analysis. material and methods: conventional pretreatment lateral cephalograms and cone beam computed tomography (cbct) scans from 50 subjects from a radiological clinic were selected in order to test the three methods: manual tracings (mt),digitized lateral cephalograms (dlc),and lateral cephalograms from cbct (lc-cbct). the lateral cephalograms were manually analyzed through the dolphin imaging 11.0™ software. twenty measurements were performed under the same conditions,and retraced after a 30-day period. paired t tests and the dahlberg formula were used to evaluate the intra-examiner errors. the pearson's correlation coefficient and one-way analysis of variance (anova) tests were used to compare the differences between the methods. results: intra-examiner reliability occurred for all methods for most of the measurements. only six measurements were different between the methods and an agreement was observed in the analyses among the 3 methods. conclusions: the results demonstrated that all evaluated methodologies are reliable and valid for scientific research,however,the method used in the lateral cephalograms from the cbct proved the most reliable.