Applicability and limitations of sex assessment based on foramen magnum

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• 作者：Zby&scaron ; ek Seifert^a ; Luká ; &scaron ; Friedl^a ; ^{lukas.friedl@gmail.com} ; Kathia Chaumoitre^b ; ^c ; Jaroslav Brůžek^d ; ^e
• 关键词：Forensic anthropology population data ; Sex assessment ; Discriminant analysis ; Reliability ; Foramen magnum ; CT imaging
• 刊名：Forensic Science International
• 出版年：2017
• 出版时间：February 2017
• 年：2017
• 卷：271
• 期：Complete
• 页码：126.e1-126.e9
• 全文大小：681 K
• 卷排序：271

文摘

Sex assessment of skeletal remains in the context of forensic investigation is one of the most important components when constructing biological profile of the deceased individual since it helps to significantly narrow down the number of potential victims. Therefore, the number of methods suitable to estimate sex should be as wide as possible, especially for cases of highly fragmented remains. This paper offers a classification method for sexing human remains based on an area around foramen magnum and tests other similar discriminatory functions published elsewhere on an independent sample from the circummediterranean region. We provide discriminant and logistic regression functions for several sets of variable combinations derived from head CT images. None of the functions performs reliably enough to be used in the forensic context. The same holds true for other discriminatory functions published in the literature. For most of the functions, the failure rate (its inability to successfully assign sex of an unknown individual) reaches 100%. Thus, despite the fact that foramen magnum is sexually dimorphic in most populations, its use in sexing cranial remains in the forensic context should be limited only to cases in which we know population affinity of unknown skeletal remains and can provide referential data from the same population to estimate sex.