Evaluation of Bilateral Asymmetry in Metric Measurements on Tibiae

Abstract

Creating a biological profile is an important parameter in the identification of skeletal remains in both bioarchaeology and forensic anthropology. In addition, the reliability of the preferred techniques when determining the biological profile affects the accuracy of the results. Bilateral asymmetry is defined as the difference between the measurements of the right and left sides of the human body, and directional asymmetry can be observed in the dimensions of the upper and lower extremities in response to mechanical regression and deformation during bone growth. Especially in forensic anthropological case studies, bilateral variations that can be found in bones while creating a biological profile from skeletal material can cause erroneous predictions. For this reason, if the presence of bilateral asymmetry between these bones is not considered while applying these methods into research, the results may cause erroneous results especially in medico-legal researches. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate the level of bilateral asymmetry before using this bone in methods to create biological profiles due to potential differences between the right and left sides. The aim of this study is to investigate the presence of bilateral asymmetry in the tibia and to examine the differences between the sex. Therefore, tibia images obtained from computerized tomography scans of 32 adult individuals without bone pathology were used in the study. Four metric measurements were taken manually from 3D tibia images processed using the Volume Rendering mode in OsiriX software. According to the statistical results related to bilateral asymmetry, it was observed that most of the tibia measurements taken from the Turkish population showed tendency to the left, but there was no statistically significant difference between the two sides in both sexes. Moreover, apart from the absolute asymmetry percentage value of MTL, there was no significant sex difference for both% AA and % DA values.

Evaluation of Suchey-Brooks age estimation method using 3 dimensional pubic symphysis images in Turkish population

“…Adlî antropolojide ölüm yaşının tahmini biyolojik profil oluşturulurken kullanılan dört önemli faktörden biridir. Cinsiyet, atasal yakınlık, yaş tahmini ve boy uzunluğu gibi unsurlardan oluşan biyolojik profilin belirlenmesi, kimliği bilinmeyen bir kişinin gerçek kimliğine ulaşılabilmesi için oldukça önemlidir (Dedouit vd., 2010;Gülhan, 2020a). Cinsiyet ve soy tahmini, diğer birçok kimliklendirme yönteminin cinsiyete ve popülasyona özgü olduğu düşünülürse, genellikle bir adlî antropoloğun belirlemesi gereken ilk iki parametredir.…”