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Forensic sex estimation using the vertebrae: an evaluation on two European populations

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Abstract

Sex estimation is one of the primary steps for constructing the biological profile of skeletal remains leading to their identification in the forensic context. While the pelvis is the most sex diagnostic bone, the cranium and other post-cranial elements have been extensively studied. Earlier research has also focused on the vertebral column with varying results regarding its sex classification accuracy as well as the underlying population specificity. The present study focuses on three easily identifiable vertebrae, namely T1, T12, and L1, and utilizes two modern European populations, a Greek and a Danish, to evaluate their forensic utility in sex identification. To this end, 865 vertebrae from 339 individuals have been analyzed for sexual dimorphism by further evaluating the effects of age-at-death and population affinity on its expression. Our results show that T1 is the best sex diagnostic vertebra for both populations reaching cross-validated accuracy of almost 90%, while age-at-death has limited effect on its sexual dimorphism. On the contrary, T12 and L1 produced varying results ranging from 75 to 83% accuracy with the Greek population exhibiting distinctively more pronounced sexual dimorphism. Additionally, age-at-death had significant effect on sexual dimorphism of T12 and L1 and especially in the Greek female and Danish male groups. Our results on inter-population comparison suggest that vertebral sex discriminant functions, and especially those utilizing multiple measurements, are highly population specific and optimally suitable only for their targeted population. An open-source software tool to facilitate classifying new cases based on our results is made freely available to forensic researchers.

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Data availability

Please contact the author for data requests. Sex estimation software is freely available under GPLv3 (see manuscript for further details).

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments in earlier versions of this manuscript.

Funding

This work was partially supported by an Erasmus+ internship program (7034/2019) issued by the State Scholarships Foundation (Greece) granted to Nefeli Garoufi.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Animal and Human Physiology, Faculty of Biology, School of Sciences, University of Athens, Panepistimiopolis, GR 157 01, Athens, Greece

    Nefeli Garoufi, Andreas Bertsatos & Maria-Eleni Chovalopoulou

  2. Science and Technology in Archaeology and Culture Research Center, The Cyprus Institute, 2121, Aglantzia, Nicosia, Cyprus

    Maria-Eleni Chovalopoulou

  3. Laboratory of Advanced Imaging and 3D Modelling Section of Forensic Pathology, Department of Forensic Medicine, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Chiara Villa

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  1. Nefeli Garoufi
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  2. Andreas Bertsatos
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  4. Chiara Villa
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Correspondence to Nefeli Garoufi.

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The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Ethics approval

No formal ethical consent is needed from Danish ethical committees to work with CT images of dead humans. Medico-legal autopsies are mandated by the police and CT scans are part of the routine investigation at the Department of Forensic Medicine of the University of Copenhagen. The Department of Forensic Medicine adheres to Danish standards accreditation regarding data security. The data have been fully anonymized. Only age and sex data were retained for the project. Access to the Athens Collection has been granted by the Department of Animal and Human Physiology of the University of Athens.

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Garoufi, N., Bertsatos, A., Chovalopoulou, ME. et al. Forensic sex estimation using the vertebrae: an evaluation on two European populations. Int J Legal Med 134, 2307–2318 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00414-020-02430-w

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