Tibial healing after secondary alveolar bone grafting: Usefulness of ultrasonography

Both clinical and X-ray findings have been used for postoperative assessment of the donor site following secondary alveolar bone grafting in our department. However, this approach requires that patients be exposed to X-ray irradiation several times at the donor site and the cleft site. Furthermore, the findings do not depict bone healing status in detail and thus offer little information to help in deciding the required duration of postoperative movement restriction. Therefore, we sought to determine the utility of ultrasound in addition to X-ray for evaluating bone surface healing at the donor site.