Objectives: To evaluate changes in the volume and cross-sectional area of the nasal airway before and 1 year after nonsurgical miniscrew-assisted rapid maxillary expansion (MARME) in young adults. Materials and Methods: Fourteen patients (mean age, 22.7 years; 10 women, four men) with a transverse discrepancy who underwent cone beam computed tomography before (T0), immediately after (T1), and 1 year after (T2) expansion were retrospectively included in this study. The volume of the nasal cavity and nasopharynx and the cross-sectional area of the anterior, middle, and posterior segments of the nasal airway were measured and compared among the three timepoints using paired t -tests. Results: The volume of the nasal cavity showed a significant increase at T1 and T2 ( P < .05), while that of the nasopharynx increased only at T2 ( P < .05). The anterior and middle cross-sectional areas significantly increased at T1 and T2 ( P < .05), while the posterior cross-sectional area showed no significant change throughout the observation period ( P > .05). Conclusions: The results demonstrate that the volume and cross-sectional area of the nasal cavity increased after MARME and were maintained at 1 year after expansion. Therefore, MARME may be helpful in expanding the nasal airway.

The report reflects an agreement based on the consensus conference of the International Standardization Committee on the Objective Assessment of the Nasal Airway in Riga, 2nd Nov. 2016. The aim of the conference was to address the existing nasal airway function tests and to take into account physical, mathematical and technical correctness as a base of international standardization as well as the requirements of the Council Directive 93/42/EEC of 14 June 1993 concerning medical devices. Rhinomanometry, acoustic rhinometry, peak nasal inspiratory flow, Odiosoft-Rhino, optical rhinometry, 24-h measurements, computational fluid dynamics, nasometry and the mirrow test were evaluated for important diagnostic criteria, which are the precision of the equipment including calibration and the software applied; validity with sensitivity, specificity, positive and negative predictive values, reliability with intra-individual and inter-individual reproducibility and responsiveness in clinical studies. For rhinomanometry, the logarithmic effective resistance was set as the parameter of high diagnostic relevance. In acoustic rhinometry, the area of interest for the minimal cross-sectional area will need further standardization. Peak nasal inspiratory flow is a reproducible and fast test, which showed a high range of mean values in different studies. The state of the art with computational fluid dynamics for the simulation of the airway still depends on high performance computing hardware and will, after standardization of the software and both the software and hardware for imaging protocols, certainly deliver a better understanding of the nasal airway flux.

Multi-physics simulations are at the heart of today's engineering applications. The trend is towards more realistic and detailed simulations, which demand highly resolved spatial and temporal scales of various physical mechanisms to solve engineering problems in a reasonable amount of time. As a consequence, numerical codes need to run efficiently on high-performance computers. Therefore, the framework Zonal Flow Solver (ZFS) featuring lattice-Boltzmann, finite-volume, discontinuous Galerkin, level set and Lagrange solvers has been developed. The solvers can be combined to simulate, e.g. quasi-incompressible and compressible flow, aeroacoustics, moving boundaries and particle dynamics. In this manuscript, the multi-physics implementation of the coupling mechanisms are presented. The parallelisation approach, the involved solvers and their scalability on state-of-the-art heterogeneous high-performance computers are discussed. Various multi-physics applications complement the discussion. The results show ZFS to be a highly efficient and flexible multi-purpose tool that can be used to solve varying classes of coupled problems.