Sinthubua Apichat, Ruengdit Sittiporn, Das Srijit, Mahakkanukrauh Pasuk
Forensic Osteology Research Center, Faculty of Medicine, Chiang Mai University, Chiang Mai, Thailand.
Excellence in Osteology Research and Training Center (ORTC), Chiang Mai University, Chiang Mai, Thailand.
Anat Cell Biol. 2017 Dec;50(4):261-264. doi: 10.5115/acb.2017.50.4.261. Epub 2017 Dec 29.
Sex estimation is one of the crucial procedures in the biological profile identification of human skeletal remains. Knowing sex of unknown case can lead to accurate and appropriate methods for predicting age, stature, ancestry, or even personal identification. Skull is one of the most reliable one among other skeletons and it is usually retained for both archaeological and forensic contexts. Although many morphological features and metric measurements of skull have been studied for sexing, but to the best of our knowledge is no study on maxillary suture length for sex estimation. Therefore, this study aims to develop a new sex estimation method for a Thai population by determining three maxillary suture lengths: anterior, transverse, and posterior maxillary suture, by computerizing amount of pixel obtained from photographs of these sutures. The present study was conducted on 190 Thai bone samples of which 96 were males and 94 were females. Independent test revealed statistically significant difference (<0.01) between males and females in all maxillary suture measurements. Equations derived from prediction model, which required three maxillary suture lengths gave 76.8421% accuracy from the leave-one-out cross validation in estimating sex percentage accuracies in predicting sex from these equations, which were relatively moderate. This study provides a novel and objective sex estimation method for Thais. It suggests that maxillary suture length can be applied for sex estimation. The new computerized technique will contribute basis knowledge and method for sex estimation, especially when only base of skull is available in forensic circumstance.
性别估计是人类骨骼遗骸生物特征识别中的关键步骤之一。了解未知案例的性别有助于采用准确恰当的方法来预测年龄、身高、血统，甚至进行个人身份识别。颅骨是众多骨骼中最可靠的骨骼之一，在考古和法医领域通常都会留存。尽管人们已经研究了颅骨的许多形态特征和测量指标用于性别鉴定，但据我们所知，尚无关于利用上颌缝长度进行性别估计的研究。因此，本研究旨在通过确定三条上颌缝的长度：上颌前缝、上颌横缝和上颌后缝，并将从这些缝线照片中获取的像素数量进行计算机处理，从而为泰国人群开发一种新的性别估计方法。本研究使用了190份泰国骨骼样本，其中96份为男性样本，94份为女性样本。独立检验显示，在所有上颌缝测量中，男性和女性之间存在统计学上的显著差异（<0.01）。从预测模型得出的方程需要三条上颌缝的长度，在留一法交叉验证中，利用这些方程预测性别的准确率为76.8421%，该准确率相对适中。本研究为泰国人提供了一种新颖且客观的性别估计方法。这表明上颌缝长度可用于性别估计。这种新的计算机技术将为性别估计提供基础知识和方法，特别是在法医情况下仅能获取颅底的情况下。
