Saint-Martin Pauline, Rérolle Camille, Dedouit Fabrice, Rousseau Hervé, Rougé Daniel, Telmon Norbert
Laboratoire d'Anthropologie Moléculaire et Imagerie de Synthèse, AMIS UMR 5288 CNRS, 37 allées Jules Guesde, 31073, Toulouse Cedex, France,
Int J Legal Med. 2014 Jul;128(4):675-83. doi: 10.1007/s00414-014-0987-z. Epub 2014 Mar 26.
The contribution of magnetic resonance imaging to forensic age estimation of living individuals is a subject of ongoing research. Several studies have focused on the wrist, clavicle, knee, and foot, and shown interesting results regarding the 18-year threshold. Authors have developed various staging systems for epiphyseal growth plate maturation. However, the procedure is observer-dependent and requires experience and a certain time-learning process. To reduce these pitfalls, we have developed an automatic method based on the analysis of variations of gray levels within the epiphyseal-metaphyseal junction. This method was tested on 160 MRI scans of the distal tibial epiphysis in a sample of individuals aged from 8 to 25 years old, after intensity non-uniformity correction of all images. Results showed that in our sample, 97.4 % of males and 93.9 % of females aged 18 years or more would be correctly classified using this method. To our knowledge, automatic methods for MRI analysis have not been used in the field of age estimation yet. Further studies should be performed to assess the validity of this procedure.
磁共振成像对活体个体法医年龄估计的贡献是一个正在进行研究的课题。几项研究聚焦于手腕、锁骨、膝盖和足部，并在18岁这个临界值方面显示出有趣的结果。作者们已经开发出了各种用于骨骺生长板成熟的分期系统。然而，该程序依赖于观察者，需要经验以及一定的学习过程。为了减少这些缺陷，我们基于对骨骺 - 干骺端交界处灰度变化的分析开发了一种自动方法。在对所有图像进行强度不均匀性校正后，该方法在160例年龄在8至25岁个体的胫骨远端骨骺的MRI扫描图像上进行了测试。结果表明，在我们的样本中，使用这种方法，18岁及以上的男性中有97.4%、女性中有93.9%能够被正确分类。据我们所知，MRI分析的自动方法尚未在年龄估计领域中使用。应进行进一步研究以评估该程序的有效性。
