The combination of skills required by a plastic surgeon are phenomenal, especially when viewed by those of us without an artistic bone in our bodies. The aesthetic quality of their work is more than important: it's what makes and breaks careers. A report in the March/April issue of Archives of Facial Plastic Surgery (Arch Facial Plast Surg. 2007;9:113-119) details a new technique that plastic surgeons can add to their artisan's toolbox for achieving aesthetic harmony in facial procedures.
Quite simply, the authors, Travis Tollefson MD and Jonathan Sykes MD of the University of California-Davis Medical Center in Sacramento, analyzed before and after photos of facial surgery patients to arrive at a standard scale for calibration of measurements and angles.
They used "constant facial landmarks, the porion and the pupil" to arrive at a reproducible measurement for use by surgeons as a guide. The porion is top of the external ear canal. They measured the distance from the porion to the pogonion (the most prominent point on the chin), in addition to comparing several other measurements of facial features in the photographs.
The similarities that they found in measurement changes after surgery, across all patient photographs and regardless of photo size, led the authors to conclude that the distance between porion and pogonion can be used along with other soft tissue measurements as a guide in facial analysis for reconstruction.
For you and me, that means facial plastic surgeons can be more informed now in their artistic judgement for creating beautiful results.