THE USE OF THE LATEST TECHNOLOGIES IN THE TEAMWORK IN CLEFT LIP AND PALATE TREATMENT – MK EXPERIENCE

Twenty first century has brought revolutionary changes in quality of human life in many ways, including oral health care. Newer technologies and materials are coming up every day which has helped in newer strategies for diagnosis, prevention and quality treatment outcome. Treatment of the patients with clefts is a long and multidisciplinary process with the participation of many specialties which form “the cleft team”, including the work of the most important members in the team, the maxillofacial surgeon and the orthodontist. The orthodontist enters the team a few days after the baby is born with pre surgical orthodontic therapy in order to prepare it for a further surgical treatment. Lip correction is performed on the age of 3 months and the palatal correction after the child milky teeth are present in the mouth around turning of 2 year of age. The first phase of the orthodontic treatment consist out a distraction of the maxillary segments which results in a soft and hard tissue or cleft lip and palate direction. The second phase of the orthodontic treatment is being conducted in order to incite a normal occlusion or if a skeletal discrepancy exists, to prepare jaw arches for orthognatic surgery leading the patient with normal occlusion, anatomo – morphological and functional face expression, normal chewing, normal speech development, and development of the patient into a healthy socialized person. All of these is helped with the latest technologies: 3D intraoral scanner, The use of cone beam computed tomography (CBCT) is the newest innovation and it has multiple application in orthodontics, from analysis of root canal anatomy to orthognathic surgical planning and evaluation of treatment outcome. Skeletal anchorage systems, 3D imaging and virtual treatment planning, 3D surface scanning, CAD-CAM are the few recent advances in field of orthodontics. These are likely to revolutionize the current orthodontic clinical practice in next decade helping to have a better treatment to patients with any kind of cleft.