Abstract

Computed tomography (CT) is a promising modality for measuring the dimensions of the internal nasal valve (INV). A systematic review was performed by collecting medical literature from Medline, Ovid, PubMed, and Embase databases to determine original research articles that evaluated the usefulness of CT in measuring INV dimensions. Of the eight articles selected, two case-control studies could not confirm whether CT had clinical application as a criterion for septoplasty. Three prospective studies also showed non-promising estimation results of the INV using CT in rhinoplasties. Of the three retrospective studies, one suggested that axial CT is useful to assess narrowvalved INV with high sensitivity, one corroborated the benefit of using CT to assess the INV radiographically, but one showed that CT was inferior to other techniques for this purpose. Therefore, current evidence shows that CT may be effective but not sufficient to accurately measure INV dimensions.