Palmer notation
Palmer notation (named after Ohio dentist Dr. Corydon Palmer) is a system used by dentists to associate information to a specific tooth. Also known as the Military System. Although supposedly superseded by the FDI World Dental Federation notation, it overwhelmingly continues to be the preferred method used by orthodontists, dental students and practitioners in the United Kingdom.
It was originally termed the Zsigmondy system after the Hungarian dentist Adolf Zsigmondy who developed the idea in 1861, using a Zsigmondy cross to record quadrants of tooth positions.. Adult teeth were numbered 1 to 8, and the child primary dentition (also called deciduous, milk or baby teeth) were depicted with a quadrant grid using Roman numerals I, II, III, IV, V to number the teeth from the midline. Palmer changed this to A, B, C, D, E. This makes it less confusing and less prone to errors in interpretation.
The Palmer notation consists of a symbol (┘└ ┐┌) designating in which quadrant the tooth is found and a number indicating the position from the midline. Adult teeth are numbered 1 to 8, with deciduous (baby) teeth indicated by a letter A to E. Hence the left and right maxillary central incisor would have the same number, "1", but the right one would have the symbol, "┘", underneath it, while the left one would have, "└".
Orientation of the chart is traditionally "dentist's view", i.e. patient's right corresponds to notation chart left. The designations "left" and "right" on the chart, however, nonetheless correspond to the patient's left and right, respectively.
With the move from written dental notes to electronic records, some difficulty in reproducing the symbols has been encountered. On a standard keyboard 'slash' and 'backslash' may be used as a crude approximation to the symbols with numbers placed before or afterwards; hence 3/ is 3┘ and /5 is ┌5
Daniel Johnson has put together a Palmer Tooth Notation TrueType font called FreePalmer. It can be downloaded: "FreePalmer TrueType Font". It is covered by the GPL 3 license. This font is descended from FreeSans, part of the "Freefont project". A screenshot showing it working in OpenOffice can be seen here: "FreePalmer in OpenOffice". A derivative which enables the grid patterns to be produced that correspond to handwritten Palmer tooth notations is available for download as well "FreePalmerMP7 TrueType Font".
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