Introduction: Secondary or residual cleft lip and nasal deformities following primary unilateral or bilateral cleft lip repair are common. Many classification systems have been proposed to describe congenital cleft lip and palate deformities before repair. This article proposes a one-of-a-kind classification system for residual cleft deformities and describes its application to 136 cleft lip revision cases from cleft outreach missions worldwide.
Methods: Patients' demographics and deformities were classified preoperatively, and a database of the classification was created. Postoperatively, the type of surgery performed was added to the database and comparison was done using an independent t test.
Results: Kappa coefficient was 0.92 and showed excellent agreement between the type assigned preoperatively to the patient and the type of procedure done.
Conclusions: This system proves to provide good descriptions of the deformities, is user friendly, facilitates the planning of the corrective surgical procedure, and enhances the communicative lingo between surgeons and members of cleft multidisciplinary care teams. It is broadly applicable in outreach missions with limited resources and cleft referral centers with considerable load.
Keywords: classification; cleft lip; cleft revision; congenital cleft deformities; outreach missions; residual deformities.