Did you know that OPAL contains a rapid means of performing cephalometric outcome audit for this important group of patients. You are encouraged to look at and use this tool for all your orthognathic patients. As with all audit tools and outcome measures, it only tells part of the story, but it is useful and good to have as part of your clinical records.

To generate a partially completed form, highlight one or two x-ray tracings in a patient folder, then select File > New > Surgical Orthodontic Analysis.

In OPAL you can save x-ray tracings in a file format known as SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics). These SVG files can be viewed in some web browsers (e.g. Firefox), edited using a free vector graphics editor called Inkscape or loaded into the Opal Tracing program.

SVG is probably a good format to e-mail to others, who would not need Opal in order to view or modify the tracings for any purpose. If they do have Opal, then the SVG format has an advantage over the normal Opal tracing file format in that it carries the basic patient details.

Using Inkscape, you can easily make any number of modifications to the displayed tracing. These could include modifying line thickness and colour, changing text sizes and fonts, deleting, resizing or moving whole sections of the tracing. Of particular interest is that tracings can easily be made anonymous - the patient name replaced with some code or simply deleted.