The RhinoCEROS Guidelines: A Practical Tool for Reporting Nasal Anatomy on Computed Tomography Pertaining to Rhinoplasty

McIntosh C, Stutterheim J, Prinsloo H, Randall M, Toman J, Pisapia F.

What this paper says

The authors propose a standard checklist, called RhinoCEROS, for radiologists to describe the nasal structures that matter to a rhinoplasty surgeon when reporting a CT scan.

Overview

Cone beam computed tomography has become cheaper and is now often available in a surgeon's own office, so more rhinoplasty surgeons order scans before surgery. The abstract states that radiologists currently vary in which nasal structures they comment on, because no agreed reporting protocol exists. This article sets out proposed guidelines to fill that gap.

Sections of note

Type of article: a proposed reporting guideline, not a study of patients.
RhinoCEROS stands for Rhinoplasty Cephalometric Evaluation for Radiologic pre-Operative Systematization.
The stated problem is inconsistency among radiologists in describing structures of the nose and nasal cavity on CT.
The stated driver is the spread of affordable in office cone beam CT.
The guideline is described as a template covering the primary aspects of nasal anatomy on CT that affect rhinoplasty outcomes.
The abstract lists no patient numbers, no validation testing and no measured effect on surgical results.

What it means for a patient

If your surgeon orders a CT before rhinoplasty, the written report may not currently mention everything the surgeon needs, and this proposal aims to fix that.
Nothing here changes what happens in the operating room. It is about how imaging findings are written down.
This is a proposal only. The abstract reports no test of whether using the template changes surgical planning, outcomes or complication rates.

Why this paper matters

Preoperative imaging is becoming routine in rhinoplasty practice, and a scan is only useful if the report names the structures that drive surgical decisions, such as the septum and the nasal airway. A shared template would let surgeons compare reports across radiologists and institutions. Whether radiologists adopt it, and whether adoption improves outcomes, is unanswered in this abstract.

Terms

Computed tomography: a scan that builds cross sectional images of the body from X-rays.
Cone beam CT: a lower dose CT variant using a cone shaped X-ray beam, small enough for an office setting.
Cephalometric: relating to standardized measurements of the head and face.
Nasal cavity: the air space inside the nose behind the nostrils.
Preoperative assessment: the evaluation done before surgery to plan the operation.

Summary written by rhinoplasty.cc from the abstract, 2026-09-09; not medical advice. The authors' own abstract follows.

From the abstract

“Cone-beam computed tomography (CT) is gaining popularity worldwide due to an increasingly diffuse and affordable in-office availability. It is becoming more commonplace for rhinoplasty surgeons to utilize this imaging as tool for preoperative assessment; however, there is inconsistency among radiologists commenting on…”

Excerpt; the full abstract is on PubMed.