Dental And Skeletal Changes Of Posterior Crossbite Young Adults After Rapid Maxillary Expansion

[Objective] The purpose of this study was to evaluate the dental and skeletal changes of posterior crossbite young adults after rapid maxillary expansion with the use of 3-dimension laser scanning technology, traditional dental cast and cephalometric measurements, which including the changes of mid-palatal suture, maxillary dental arch, alveolar arch, palatal contour, clinical crown height, mandibular plane angle, and the lower facial height.[Methods] The observation group included 13 YA-RME subjects, while the control group included 20 RME subjects in mixted dentine. All of them were treated with acrylic bonded maxillary expansion appliance, and records were taken at the pre-treatment time (T1) and post-treatment(T2) including maxillary transverse arch width, gingival width, alveolar width, arch length, arch perimeter, clinical crown height, molar angle, palatal vault angle, palatal width at gingival height, palatal width at mid-palate, palatal width difference, MP-SN angle and ANS-Me distance, of which the measurements of palatal contour were derived by the use of 3-D LST. Students' t-test were used to determine if there were significant differences between 2 time periods and between 2 groups with SPSS 11.0 software.