Limits in the sex estimation human skeletons resulting from the population specificity of classification functions - an example of sexual dimorphism of tibia.

Forensic anthropology has developed classification techniques for sex estimation of unknown skeletal remains, namely population-specific discriminant functions or other functions. What are their authors usually aware of. These methods were designed for populations that lived mostly in the late 19th and 20th century but they are presented as valid in recent populations. Their level of reliability or misclassification is important for practical use in today's forensic practice, however it is unknown. We addressed the question what the likelihood of errors would be if population specificity of discriminant functions of the tibia were disregarded. The purpose of this diploma thesis is to give an evidence about the inappropriateness of using population specific methods and methods affected by secular trend. We measured 10 variables traditionally used for sex assessment of the tibia based on a sample of segmented models of 30 male and 26 female CT images from recent adult Czech population. In addition we created two own discriminant function for Czech population, accuracy of DF1 is 85.7 % and accuracy of DF2 is 82.1 %. To estimate the error rates ignoring population specificity, we selected a published classification function of tibia for the European American population (Işcan and Miller-Shaivitz,..