Potente Stefan, Kettner Mattias, Ishikawa Takaki
Osaka City University Medical School, Asahi-machi 1-4-3, Abeno, Osaka, 545-8585, Japan.
Department of Legal Medicine of Frankfurt Medical School, Kennedyallee 104, 60596, Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
Int J Legal Med. 2019 Mar;133(2):491-499. doi: 10.1007/s00414-018-1928-z. Epub 2018 Sep 25.
The concept of nomography was developed around 1880 as a means to compute formulas graphically. Regular use has decreased over time in most fields, mainly owing to progress in electronic computation devices. In forensic pathology, nomography is still used in the so-called "nomogram method" for the estimation of time since death. It is the graphical representation of the formula by Marshall and Hoare with the parameters of Henssge. Here, two nomograms exist (for ambient temperatures below and above 23 °C, no imperial measurements). Rounding for body weight input and result reading introduces errors. In addition, correction factors, applied to body weight, allow to adapt for certain conditions on the crime scene and are essential to the method. They are not directly integrated into the nomograms but must be applied in advance. A formula, scaling correction factors for different body weights, was later added by Henssge, along with a simplified table for case work. In this publication, we present newly designed time since death nomographs as representations of Henssge's parameters with the addition of both metric and imperial measurements, integration of weight adjusted scaling of correction factors, and a geometrically consistent framework for body weight and result reading, which eliminates some rounding steps and reduces the overall rounding-related estimation errors.
列线图的概念大约在1880年形成,作为一种以图形方式计算公式的方法。随着时间的推移,在大多数领域其常规使用有所减少,主要是由于电子计算设备的进步。在法医病理学中,列线图仍用于所谓的“列线图法”来估计死亡时间。它是马歇尔和霍尔公式以及亨斯格参数的图形表示。这里有两个列线图(分别用于环境温度低于和高于23°C的情况,无英制测量)。体重输入和结果读取的四舍五入引入了误差。此外,应用于体重的校正因子可用于适应犯罪现场的某些条件,并且对该方法至关重要。它们没有直接整合到列线图中,而是必须提前应用。亨斯格后来添加了一个针对不同体重缩放校正因子的公式以及一个简化的案例工作表。在本出版物中,我们展示了新设计的死亡时间列线图,它表示亨斯格参数,并增加了公制和英制测量,整合了体重调整后的校正因子缩放,以及一个体重和结果读取的几何一致框架,消除了一些四舍五入步骤并减少了总体与四舍五入相关的估计误差。