The Use of Auricular Biometrics to Identify Age and Sex in Egyptian Population Sample

Abstract

Determination of age and sex represents a challenging task to the forensic anthropologist and this explored the field of biometrics. Recognition using ear biometrics is promising and has received broad attention. In spite of this, no previous studies addressed this topic to identify Egyptian population traits. Hence, the aim of this study was to investigate the possible role of some auricular dimensions in identifying age and sex of Egyptian population sample. This study was undertaken on 426 selected healthy male and female Egyptians, aged 4–82 years. For each subject, both right and left auricular length, width, and position were measured by electronic digital caliper. The enrolled subjects were divided into six non-overlapping age groups. Statistical significant differences were found in the mean length, width, and position of both right and left auricles among the different studied age groups and between both sexes. Additionally, regression analysis revealed the following equation (for age estimation; Age (years) = - 91.884 + (19.921 x right auricular length).Moreover,all the studied measurements were significantly valid (area under the ROC curve greater than 0.6) in discriminating males from females but, the Lt auricular width showed the best accuracy (72.4 %). Finally, it could be concluded that auricular length, width, and position could be useful tools for age and sex estimation of Egyptian population.