The spatial mandibular triangle framework for quantifying structural and positional features of mandibular asymmetry: a retrospective diagnostic accuracy study.

Abstract

Objectives: To develop and internally validate the Spatial Mandibular Triangle (SMT), a novel geometric framework that quantifies morphological and positional features of mandibular asymmetry.

Materials and methods: This retrospective diagnostic accuracy study initially included 416 eligible participants. After expert assessment, 17 cases with discordant expert classifications were excluded, leaving 399 participants for analysis: 273 with mandibular asymmetry and 126 controls. A simplified SMT was constructed using bilateral condylar centers and menton. Two dimensionless indices were derived: the Structural Mandibular Asymmetry Index (SMAI), reflecting morphological asymmetry, and the Positional Mandibular Asymmetry Index (PMAI), reflecting spatial displacement. The discriminative performance of each index was evaluated against its corresponding expert-concordant classifications using receiver operating characteristic analysis, stratified 5-fold cross-validation, and bootstrap resampling.

Results: Participants with mandibular asymmetry exhibited higher SMAI and PMAI values than controls. Within the mandibular asymmetry cohort, SMAI discriminated severe from mild-to-moderate structural asymmetry with an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.932, yielding an exploratory cutoff of 2.9% at the 95% specificity criterion. PMAI identified clinically significant positional asymmetry with an AUC of 0.961, yielding an exploratory cutoff of 3.9% at the 95% sensitivity criterion. Bootstrap resampling supported the stability of the threshold estimates, and cross-validation showed consistent cutoff ranges.

Conclusions: The SMT framework provides complementary three-dimensional quantification of structural and positional features of mandibular asymmetry. SMAI and PMAI showed promising discriminative performance in internal validation.

Clinical relevance: SMT-based phenotyping may provide complementary quantitative information for characterizing the structural and positional features of mandibular asymmetry and may support comprehensive clinical assessment.