Departamento de Anatomía, Facultad de Medicina, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Circuito Interior, Ciudad Universitaria, Coyoacan, Distrito Federal 04510, Mexico.
Forensic Sci Int. 2012 Sep 10;221(1-3):156.e1-7. doi: 10.1016/j.forsciint.2012.04.027. Epub 2012 May 16.
Sex estimation is the first step for biological profile reconstruction of an unknown skeleton (archaeological or contemporary) and consequently for positive identification of skeletal remains recovered from forensic settings. Several tools have been developed using different osseous structures. With the intention to provide an objective method comparison, we reported the analysis of three different methods (visual, metric and geometric morphometrics) for sex assessment of the greater sciatic notch. One hundred and thirty pelvic bones (45.4% females and 54.6% males) from the National Autonomous University of Mexico Skeletal Collection pertaining to the contemporary Mexican population were analyzed. We used the ROC-analysis to test between desired false positive thresholds (1-specificity) and expected true positive rates (sensitivity) in order to predict the best approach to sex assessment. The comparison of the area under the ROC-curves shows significant differences among visual and metric methods. At the same time, the analysis suggested that higher morphological variation among the sexes is independent of the methodological approach. The results indicate that the metric (angle), with a high percent of indeterminate cases (34.6%), and visual, with 26.2% of the cases allocated as intermediate cases, were poorly accurate; we cannot recommend these techniques for sexing an unknown specimen. On the other hand, the geometric morphometrics approach improves sex estimation in 82.3% of correctly classified individuals with more than 95% of posterior probability. In addition to the method comparison, the major sexual variation of the greater sciatic notch was determined to be located on its posterior border.
性别鉴定是重建未知骨骼（考古或当代）生物特征谱的第一步，也是从法医学背景下恢复的骨骼遗骸进行正识别的关键。已经开发了几种使用不同骨骼结构的工具。为了提供一种客观的方法比较，我们报告了对坐骨大切迹三种不同方法（视觉、度量和几何形态计量学）进行性别评估的分析。来自墨西哥国立自治大学骨骼收藏的 130 块骨盆骨（45.4%为女性，54.6%为男性）来自当代墨西哥人群，进行了分析。我们使用 ROC 分析来测试所需的假阳性阈值（1 特异性）和预期的真阳性率（敏感性），以预测性别评估的最佳方法。ROC 曲线下面积的比较表明视觉和度量方法之间存在显著差异。同时，分析表明，两性之间更高的形态变异与方法学方法无关。结果表明，度量（角度）方法具有较高的不确定案例比例（34.6%），而视觉方法具有 26.2%的中间案例分配，准确性较差；我们不能推荐这些技术用于对未知样本进行性别鉴定。另一方面，几何形态计量学方法可提高 82.3%的个体的性别估计准确性，正确分类个体的后验概率超过 95%。除了方法比较之外，还确定了坐骨大切迹的主要性别差异位于其后缘。
