Assessment of the cleft nasal deformity using a regression equation

Area of Science:

• Plastic Surgery
• Medical Imaging
• Quantitative Assessment

Background:

• Cleft nasal deformity presents a significant surgical challenge.
• Objective and reproducible assessment of surgical outcomes is crucial for evaluating treatment efficacy.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose an objective and simple method for assessing surgical outcomes of cleft nasal deformity.
• To utilize two-dimensional digital images for outcome evaluation.

Main Methods:

• Plastic surgeons and laypersons evaluated cleft nasal deformity images.
• A novel assessment tool and regression equation were developed and validated.
• Reproducibility of the proposed method was compared to subjective surgeon grading.

Main Results:

• The layperson-based method showed higher correlation coefficients (.90) compared to surgeon grading (.80).
• The proposed method demonstrated better grade reproducibility (9.6%) than subjective surgeon assessment (14.6%).

Conclusions:

• The developed assessment tool offers a simple, reproducible, quantitative, and objective method for evaluating cleft nasal deformity surgical outcomes.
• This tool can be effectively used by both surgeons and laypersons with two-dimensional photographs.