Abstract

Almost all European countries lack contemporary skeletal collections for the development and validation of forensic anthropological methods. Furthermore, legal, ethical and practical considerations hinder the development of skeletal collections. A virtual skeletal database derived from clinical computed tomography (CT) scans provides a potential solution. However, clinical CT scans are typically generated with varying settings. This study investigates the effects of image segmentation and varying imaging conditions on the precision of virtual modelled pelves. An adult human cadaver was scanned using varying imaging conditions, such as scanner type and standard patient scanning protocol, slice thickness and exposure level. The pelvis was segmented from the various CT images resulting in virtually modelled pelves. The precision of the virtual modelling was determined per polygon mesh point. The fraction of mesh points resulting in point-to-point distance variations of 2 mm or less (95% confidence interval (CI)) was reported. Colour mapping was used to visualise modelling variability. At almost all (>97%) locations across the pelvis, the point-to-point distance variation is less than 2 mm (CI = 95%). In >91% of the locations, the point-to-point distance variation was less than 1 mm (CI = 95%). This indicates that the geometric variability of the virtual pelvis as a result of segmentation and imaging conditions rarely exceeds the generally accepted linear error of 2 mm. Colour mapping shows that areas with large variability are predominantly joint surfaces. Therefore, results indicate that segmented bone elements from patient-derived CT scans are a sufficiently precise source for creating a virtual skeletal database.

Highlights

  • The development and validation of forensic anthropological methods rely on the availability of contemporary, populationspecific skeletal collections of considerable size [1,2,3,4,5]

  • The cumulative distributions of the single-point standard deviation (SD) values obtained from the Kolmogorov–Smirnov test are visualized in Figs. 1, 2 and 3

  • The figures demonstrate that the largest differences (D-values) occur at single-point SD values that correspond to a point-to-point distance variation well below the 2 mm (CI = 95%) threshold

Read more

Summary

Introduction

The development and validation of forensic anthropological methods rely on the availability of contemporary, populationspecific skeletal collections of considerable size [1,2,3,4,5]. Examples hereof are skeletal collections such as the Bass, Terry, Hamman Todd, Pretoria Bone and Raymond Dart collection [6,7,8,9,10]. Each of these collections suffers from its unique blend of selection bias. Int J Legal Med (2017) 131:1155–1163 reflective of the larger population [12, 13]. Despite these biases, these skeletal collections serve as modern collections from which biological profile methods are developed

Objectives
Methods
Results
Conclusion
Full Text
Published version (Free)

Talk to us

Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have

Schedule a call