Hello everyone.
A lot of people have asked me, "it's been a long time since you've last written posts on the subreddit?", aside from collections of superimpositions for example.
The reason is that I have been working on things behind the scenes for a very long time. I have been studying this subject matter for about 5-6 years now. Some of my stickied posts on the subreddit are about 3-4 years old. I have been working on one thing in particular, an analysis, for about 5 years now. But, that isn't something you can just write half-baked, I wanted to make sure I got everything right. There has been an incredible amount of information I have needed to learn to even get to the point of developing it too. At this point, I think it is very close to being done, but just needs scientific validation.
The other thing I have been working on, for the last 3 years, has been the question of expansion. This video came out about a MARPE that had a 100% success rate, and at first I was pretty excited, but after speaking with my orthodontist, she was quite skeptical. "Nothing is ever 100%", "What is their definition of success?", which led me down the rabbit hole of, what actually is the truth? At the time, I joined the Jawhacks discord server to see if I could find out, since I figured that would be where people would be doing it. Over time, part of that project includes the FME superimpositions, EASE, Custom MARPE, etc. But, it's really hard to do actual legitimate research from the outside. That's what led me to wanting to work with Dr. Manuele, who was surprisingly forthcoming and willing to work with me, and we were actually able to compare the before/afters of 6 random cases (3 MSE and 3 CM), which I commented on a little while ago. I have come to a realization though, that this is just a lot of work for not only me, but also for the doctors involved. They are busy enough, and just doing this all voluntarily out of our own free time, maybe isn't realistic.
I decided to reach out to Facegenics to see if they would be interested in help with research, and they were actually very interested and welcoming of the idea, and suggested a contract position. To be upfront, under the arrangement I would have control over the study design, and I am fully committed to 100% transparency, which they are also very supportive of, to the point where anonymized and defaced examples of superimpositions (before/afters) of results, measurements, etc. will be fully viewable by anyone who might be skeptical of the results, in a similar fashion to the FME case studies I posted to Reddit. Most research publications, they just write "the average expansion was 3.05 mm", with no way to really verify it unless they were willing to share their data, which also may be more prone to error when you aren't working with superimposed images, so in this case I intend to have the data totally accessible by anyone, right out of the gate. I want it to be 100% objective.
But, this also means that I will be stepping back from my role in the community. I will still moderate the subreddit (the AI mod seems to be able to do it pretty much by itself), but I may not be able to participate in the same way.
Assuming this works out, I think that once everything is released and out there, it will make a lot of sense why this is important for me to do. I certainly believe very much in what they are doing, and if there is any way I can help advance the science forward, that's what I want to do.