Forensic sex estimation using the vertebrae: an evaluation on two European populations
Autor: | Andreas Bertsatos, Maria-Eleni Chovalopoulou, Chiara Villa, Nefeli Garoufi |
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Rok vydání: | 2020 |
Předmět: |
Adult
Male Denmark Population Context (language use) Lumbar vertebrae Biology 01 natural sciences Thoracic Vertebrae Pathology and Forensic Medicine Danish Young Adult 03 medical and health sciences 0302 clinical medicine Ethnicity medicine Humans 030216 legal & forensic medicine education Aged Aged 80 and over Sex Characteristics education.field_of_study Lumbar Vertebrae Greece 010401 analytical chemistry Discriminant Analysis Middle Aged Sex Determination by Skeleton language.human_language 0104 chemical sciences Vertebra Sexual dimorphism medicine.anatomical_structure Evolutionary biology language Female Identification (biology) Software Vertebral column |
Zdroj: | International Journal of Legal Medicine. 134:2307-2318 |
ISSN: | 1437-1596 0937-9827 |
Popis: | Sex estimation is one of the primary steps for constructing the biological profile of skeletal remains leading to their identification in the forensic context. While the pelvis is the most sex diagnostic bone, the cranium and other post-cranial elements have been extensively studied. Earlier research has also focused on the vertebral column with varying results regarding its sex classification accuracy as well as the underlying population specificity. The present study focuses on three easily identifiable vertebrae, namely T1, T12, and L1, and utilizes two modern European populations, a Greek and a Danish, to evaluate their forensic utility in sex identification. To this end, 865 vertebrae from 339 individuals have been analyzed for sexual dimorphism by further evaluating the effects of age-at-death and population affinity on its expression. Our results show that T1 is the best sex diagnostic vertebra for both populations reaching cross-validated accuracy of almost 90%, while age-at-death has limited effect on its sexual dimorphism. On the contrary, T12 and L1 produced varying results ranging from 75 to 83% accuracy with the Greek population exhibiting distinctively more pronounced sexual dimorphism. Additionally, age-at-death had significant effect on sexual dimorphism of T12 and L1 and especially in the Greek female and Danish male groups. Our results on inter-population comparison suggest that vertebral sex discriminant functions, and especially those utilizing multiple measurements, are highly population specific and optimally suitable only for their targeted population. An open-source software tool to facilitate classifying new cases based on our results is made freely available to forensic researchers. |
Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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