Legal Medicine and Toxicology Unit, Department of Cardio-Thoraco-Vascular Sciences and Public Health, University of Padua, Padua, Italy.
Unit of Forensic Medicine, Department of Diagnostics and Public Health, University of Verona, P.le Scuro, 10, 37134, Verona, Italy.
Sci Rep. 2022 Jun 22;12(1):10543. doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-14530-1.
Fracture dating is an issue at the forefront of forensic sciences. While dating fracture is crucial to understanding and verifying the chronology of events in cases of abuse and violent death, its application is the subject of considerable discussion in the scientific community, filled with limitations and difficulties. Current methods for fracture dating are mainly based on a qualitative assessment through macroscopy, microscopy, and imaging and subject to variations depending on the experience of the observer. In this paper, we investigated the potential of quantifiable micro-CT analysis for fracture dating. Five histomorphometric parameters commonly used for the study of the 3D bone trabecular microarchitecture with micro-CT were calculated based on nine fractures of known post-traumatic ages, including the degree of anisotropy, connectivity density, bone volume fraction, trabecular thickness, and trabecular separation. As a result, trends in the evolution of the microarchitecture of the bone relative to age of the callus could be identified, in particular concerning anisotropy, trabecular separation and connectivity density, consistent with the healing bone process. The findings obtained in this pilot study encourage further research in quantifiable parameters of the bone microarchitecture as they could represent useful features for the construction of objective models for fracture dating.
骨折时间推断是法医学领域的一个前沿问题。虽然确定骨折时间对于了解和验证虐待和暴力死亡案件中事件的时间顺序至关重要，但在科学界，其应用存在相当大的争议，充满了局限性和困难。目前的骨折时间推断方法主要基于宏观、微观和影像学的定性评估，并且受观察者经验的影响。在本文中，我们研究了可量化的微 CT 分析在骨折时间推断中的潜力。基于 9 个已知创伤后年龄的骨折，计算了通常用于微 CT 研究三维骨小梁微结构的 5 个组织形态计量学参数，包括各向异性程度、连通密度、骨体积分数、骨小梁厚度和骨小梁分离。结果表明，相对于骨痂的年龄，骨微结构的演化趋势可以被识别出来，特别是各向异性、骨小梁分离和连通密度，这与愈合骨过程一致。这项初步研究的结果鼓励进一步研究骨微结构的可量化参数，因为它们可能是构建骨折时间推断的客观模型的有用特征。
