Application of Enhanced Point Estimators to a Sample of In Vivo CT-derived Facial Soft Tissue Thicknesses.

Abstract

Facial approximations based on facial soft tissue depth measurement tables often utilize the arithmetic mean as a central tendency estimator. Stephan et al. (J Forensic Sci 2013;58:1439) suggest that the shorth and 75-shormax statistics are better suited to describe the central tendency of non-normal soft tissue depth data, while also accommodating normal distributions. The shorth, 75-shormax, arithmetic mean, and other central tendency estimators were evaluated using a CT-derived facial soft tissue depth dataset. Differences between arithmetic mean and shorth mean for the tissue depths examined ranged from 0 mm to +2.3 mm (average 0.6 mm). Differences between the arithmetic mean plus one standard deviation (to approximate the same data points covered by the 75-shormax) and 75-shormax values ranged from -0.8 mm to +0.7 mm (average 0.2 mm). The results of this research suggest that few practical differences exist across the central tendency point estimators for the evaluated soft tissue depth dataset.