Estimating the entire length of the fragmentary tibia with proximal and distal dimensions

Abstract

Forensic anthropology is an important scientific discipline that determines the ethnicity, sex, height and body type characteristics from human skeletal remains for the benefit of forensic medicine. One of the important tasks of forensic anthropology is to determine the stature of individual from their skeletal remains. Lower extremities are mostly preferred in estimating stature. The current study aims to develop regression formulas to estimate the entire length of the tibia in case a fragmentary tibia is found. The study was conducted on 148 tibiae excavated from the ancient city of Nicaea and are housed in the Department Anatomy, Faculty of Medicine, Bursa Uludağ University. In total, eighteen parameters were examined on the tibiae. SPSS 22.0 was used for the statistical analyses. The descriptive statistics of the tibiae were evaluated. Taking the correlations between proximal and distal morphometric traits of the tibia and the entire tibial length into consideration, regression formulas were developed to determine the entire length of the tibia. In this study, we evaluated that the morphometric characteristics of ethnic groups are different from each other and therefore the use of formulas determined for one group can increase the margin of error for other groups. In addition, we developed formulas that estimate the length of the entire tibia. We believe that the results of this study will be of great importance for both anthropology and forensic medicine.