Validation Study of Discriminating Sex using the Atlas from the Digital Korean 3D Human Body Modeling

Hong, Chong Kun; Chung, Jae Kwang; Lee, U Young; Kim, Duk Soo; Park, Dae Kyoon; Park, Kyung Ho

Abstract

Estimation of biological profile for skeletal remains by forensic anthropological examination would be possible based on physical anthropological studies which were statistically analyzed. However, physical anthropological studies for Korean population are not enough to establish biological profile for Korean because there is lack of documented osteological specimens in Korea. Recent study suggested that physical anthropological examination could be possible on the three dimensional data which were reconstructed from computed tomography, instead of preparing skeletal specimen by defleshing bone. One of the aim of this study is to evaluate Digital Korean database which were composed of computed tomographic images of 100 cadavers. The other is to perform statistical analysis on morphometrics for segmented atlas whether the results could be helpful to estimate sex in Korean. We measured 100 segmentation atlases (male 51, female 49) from the Digital Korean database which were under the control of Catholic Institute for Applied Anatomy, The Catholic University of Korea. Measurements of segmented atlas were carried out by using Mimics software (Simulation module, Version 13.0, Materialise NV, Belgium), and values of measurement were performed statistical analysis by IBM(R) SPSS(R) (version 20.0, Armonk, New York). Among 19 measurements, the width of atlas showed most crucial element for estimating sex, which was consistent with the result using dried bones of atlas and hit ratio of discriminant functions was 88.0%. 76.7 was the cut-off score of discriminant functions. This results showed that morphometrics for segmented atlas could be helpful in estimating sex using the Digital Korean database. In the future, we expect that the other researchers could more actively use the Digital Korean database as a good specimen for physical and forensic anthropological study.