Facial morphometrics of children with non-syndromic orofacial clefts in Tanzania
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Orofacial clefts (cleft lip/palate; CL/P) are among the most common congenital anomalies, with prevalence that varies among different ethnic groups. Craniofacial shape differences between individuals with CL/P and healthy controls have been widely reported in non-African populations. Knowledge of craniofacial shape among individuals with non-syndromic CL/P in African populations will provide further understanding of the ethnic and phenotypic variation present in non-syndromic orofacial clefts. METHODS: A descriptive cross-sectional study was carried out at Bugando Medical Centre, Tanzania, comparing individuals with unrepaired non-syndromic CL/P and normal individuals without orofacial clefts. Three-dimensional (3D) facial surfaces were captured using a non-invasive 3D camera. The corresponding 3D coordinates for 26 soft tissue landmarks were used to characterize facial shape. Facial shape variation within and between groups, based on Procrustes superimposed data, was studied using geometric morphometric methods. RESULTS: Facial shape of children with cleft lip differed significantly from the control group, beyond the cleft itself. The CL/P group exhibited increased nasal and mouth width, increased interorbital distance, and more prognathic premaxillary region. Within the CL/P group, PCA showed that facial shape variation is associated with facial height, nasal cavity width, interorbital distance and midfacial prognathism. The isolated cleft lip (CL) and combined cleft lip and palate (CLP) groups did not differ significantly from one another (Procrustes distance = 0.0416, p = 0.50). Procrustes distance permutation tests within the CL/P group showed a significant shape difference between unilateral clefts and bilateral clefts (Procrustes distance = 0.0728, p = 0.0001). Our findings indicate the morphological variation is similar to those of studies of CL/P patients and their unaffected close relatives in non-African populations. CONCLUSION: The mean facial shape in African children with non-syndromic CL/P differs significantly from children without orofacial clefts. The main differences involve interorbital width, facial width and midface prognathism. The axes of facial shape differences we observed are similar to the patterns seen in Caucasian populations, despite apparent differences in cleft prevalence and cleft type distribution. Similar facial morphology in individuals with CL/P in African and Caucasian populations suggests a similar aetiology.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".