A new method for locating anterior skeletal landmarks from soft tissue measurements

Clinical examination of human profiles provides some idea of the localization of hard tissue landmarks, but is unreliable because of large variability in thickness of the soft tissues. In this investigation an instrument was developed to measure the thickness of the lips. Linear regression was applied to estimate cephalometric hard tissue landmarks from those in the soft tissues. By adding information from direct clinical measurements to the model for estimating hard tissue landmarks from soft tissue landmarks, the correlation between the digitized (actual) and estimated or calculated landmarks was significantly improved.