Utility of micro-CT for dating post-cranial fractures of known post-traumatic ages through 3D measurements of the trabecular inner morphology

Abstract

Fracture dating is an issue at the forefront of forensic sciences. While dating fracture is crucial to understanding and verifying the chronology of events in cases of abuse and violent death, its application is the subject of considerable discussion in the scientific community, filled with limitations and difficulties. Current methods for fracture dating are mainly based on a qualitative assessment through macroscopy, microscopy, and imaging and subject to variations depending on the experience of the observer. In this paper, we investigated the potential of quantifiable micro-CT analysis for fracture dating. Five histomorphometric parameters commonly used for the study of the 3D bone trabecular microarchitecture with micro-CT were calculated based on nine fractures of known post-traumatic ages, including the degree of anisotropy, connectivity density, bone volume fraction, trabecular thickness, and trabecular separation. As a result, trends in the evolution of the microarchitecture of the bone relative to age of the callus could be identified, in particular concerning anisotropy, trabecular separation and connectivity density, consistent with the healing bone process. The findings obtained in this pilot study encourage further research in quantifiable parameters of the bone microarchitecture as they could represent useful features for the construction of objective models for fracture dating.

Influence of Chinese Herbal Formula on Bone Characteristics of Cobb Broiler Chickens

“…Micro CT has been considered the gold standard for evaluating bone morphology and bone microarchitecture [ 18 , 19 ]. Micro CT can accurately quantify bone parameters such as BMD, Tb.Th, Tb.N, Tb.Sp and other bone parameters.…”

Determining rib fracture age from CT scans with a radiomics-based combined model: a multicenter retrospective study

“…Subsequently, Klontzas et al [ 47 ] applied CT-based radiomics to predict postmortem interval, yielding promising results in this exploratory study (AUC = 0.75, 95%CI = 0.584–0.916). A previous forensic study [ 48 ] indicated an association between CT-based quantitative parameters and the age of rib fractures. However, the limited sample size ( n = 9) and the finite number of extracted features ( n = 5) were insufficient for conducting ML analysis.…”