Assessment of facial morphology in patients with orofacial clefts in relation to surgical protocols

The presented thesis summarizes the results of research on craniofacial morphology in patients with facial cleft defects in relation to therapeutic approaches (Caganova et al., 2014; Dadáková et al., 2016; Hoffmannova et al., 2016; Hoffmannova et al., 2018; Moslerová et al., 2018). The effect of therapy in individuals with pathological growth disorders cannot be evaluated without detailed auxological studies of control subjects whose facial morphology, longitudinal changes, or manifestations of sexual dimorphism were evaluated upon similar methodology (Koudelová et al. 2015). Therefore, the thesis was conceived as a volume of six publications complemented with a general synthetic introduction into the area of study. Together, the thesis includes probands in a broad age spectrum from birth to 15 years with a total of 294 facial 3D scans, 36 tele-X-ray face images, 3D scans of 112 gypsum palate castings. The methods of geometric morphometry and multidimensional statistics prevail in the assessment. The main clinical part of the thesis deals with the influence of two types of surgery on the facial growth and development of patients with cleft palate, namely secondary spongioplasty (SS) and neonatal cheiloplasty (NCH). Neonatal cheiloplasty (NCH) is the surgery whose effects were studied from several..