Sironi Emanuele, Gallidabino Matteo, Weyermann Céline, Taroni Franco
School of Criminal Justice, University of Lausanne, Building Batochime, 1015, Lausanne, Dorigny, Switzerland.
Int J Legal Med. 2016 Mar;130(2):475-88. doi: 10.1007/s00414-015-1173-7. Epub 2015 Mar 21.
Due to the rise of criminal, civil and administrative judicial situations involving people lacking valid identity documents, age estimation of living persons has become an important operational procedure for numerous forensic and medicolegal services worldwide. The chronological age of a given person is generally estimated from the observed degree of maturity of some selected physical attributes by means of statistical methods. However, their application in the forensic framework suffers from some conceptual and practical drawbacks, as recently claimed in the specialised literature. The aim of this paper is therefore to offer an alternative solution for overcoming these limits, by reiterating the utility of a probabilistic Bayesian approach for age estimation. This approach allows one to deal in a transparent way with the uncertainty surrounding the age estimation process and to produce all the relevant information in the form of posterior probability distribution about the chronological age of the person under investigation. Furthermore, this probability distribution can also be used for evaluating in a coherent way the possibility that the examined individual is younger or older than a given legal age threshold having a particular legal interest. The main novelty introduced by this work is the development of a probabilistic graphical model, i.e. a Bayesian network, for dealing with the problem at hand. The use of this kind of probabilistic tool can significantly facilitate the application of the proposed methodology: examples are presented based on data related to the ossification status of the medial clavicular epiphysis. The reliability and the advantages of this probabilistic tool are presented and discussed.
由于涉及缺乏有效身份证件人员的刑事、民事和行政司法情况不断增加，在世人员年龄估计已成为全球众多法医和法医学服务的一项重要操作程序。通常通过统计方法，根据观察到的某些选定身体特征的成熟程度来估计特定人员的实际年龄。然而，正如专业文献中最近所指出的，它们在法医框架中的应用存在一些概念和实际缺陷。因此，本文的目的是通过重申概率贝叶斯方法在年龄估计中的效用，提供一种克服这些限制的替代解决方案。这种方法允许以透明的方式处理年龄估计过程中的不确定性，并以关于被调查人员实际年龄的后验概率分布的形式生成所有相关信息。此外，这种概率分布还可用于以连贯的方式评估被检查个体小于或大于具有特定法律利益的给定法定年龄阈值的可能性。这项工作引入的主要新颖之处在于开发了一种概率图形模型，即贝叶斯网络，用于处理手头的问题。使用这种概率工具可以显著促进所提出方法的应用：基于与内侧锁骨骨骺骨化状态相关的数据给出了示例。介绍并讨论了这种概率工具的可靠性和优势。
