Short- and long-term effects of conventional and miniscrew-assisted rapid palatal expansion on hard tissues using voxel-based superimposition of serial cone-beam computed tomography scans.

Introduction: The objective of this study was to evaluate the short-term and long-term hard-tissue changes with miniscrew-assisted rapid palatal expansion (MARPE) and rapid palatal expansion (RPE) compared with a matched control group with voxel-based superimposition using 3-dimensional cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) scans.

Methods: A total of 180 CBCT scans were analyzed for 60 patients with a mean age of 13.9 years at 3 time points: pretreatment (T1), postexpansion (T2), and posttreatment (T3).