Surgeries intending to reposition upper and lower jaw in patients suffering from dysgnathia and malocclusion are common and well established, but highly elective interventions. 3-d virtual planning for this kind of procedures was recently introduced in the clinical routine of modern cranio-maxillofacial (CMF) surgery. Nevertheless the transfer of the planning data into the surgical procedure is usually realized with occlusal wavers, like it has been done since 40 years. This technique allows a very precise control of the position of the jaws to each other in the sagittal and transversal dimension. New systems have to be implemented to guarantee a real three-dimensional control of the planned bone fragment position especially the relation between maxilla and skull base. A high accuracy promising solution is a real-time 3-d navigational system, enabling an interactive visual control during the repositioning process. In this study the validation of the system for the use in orthognatic surgery is presented and first clinical experiences are reported. As a primary approach the system was tested in a laboratory environment and in a second step it was serving as an additional control tool to evaluate maxillary positional accuracy during orthognathic surgery in a small series of patients.

Conflict of interest: None declared.