International Journal of Legal Medicine最新文献

In forensic medicine, hanging is a frequent cause of non-natural death which may pose diagnostic problems on the investigator due to the manifold and sometimes ambiguous autopsy findings. The great variability of appearances potentially impedes the classification as to the manner of death (suicide, accident, homicide). The significance of some signs formerly considered to prove vital suspension could not always be confirmed in more recent studies. Therefore, traditional conception passed on from generation to generation must be critically questioned and, if necessary, replaced by evidence-based knowledge derived from systematic evaluations of relevant case material and laboratory tests, where appropriate. Bearing in mind the numerous possible misinterpretations, a dogmatic view must be avoided in favour of a cautious and holistic assessment. The review presented here provides an overview of problem areas based on the pertinent literature, photographic material of real cases and the authors' professional experience.

The hyoid bone plays a significant role in forensic science, primarily cause and mechanism of death evaluation. It can also aid in biological profiling, including sex and age estimation and the study of biological variations. This study examined hyoid bone variation in the Croatian population and developed sex and age estimation models for forensic applications. On 220 multi-slice computed tomography (MSCT) scans containing hyoid bones (ages 18-92; 102 females, 118 males), landmarks were placed to classify the bones by shape, symmetry, isometry, and fusion category. Sex was estimated with 86.67% accuracy during cross-validation and 87.50% in the test set using just three interlandmark distances. For age estimation, 96%-100% of individuals with a fusion score of 4 were correctly classified as older than 34. Notably, 66.82% of hyoid bones were asymmetric, and the D shape was most prevalent. To facilitate transparency and reproducibility, a publicly accessible web-based application supporting probabilistic sex estimation and fusion-based age-related interpretation was developed ( https://huggingface.co/spaces/ijerkovic/CroHyoIdea ).

Judicial authorities are increasingly concerned by determining the age of unaccompanied adolescents or young adults under suspicion. When other approaches are considered insufficient, courts demand appropriate medical tests. Part of those tests aim at determining the civil age through skeletal age. However, this determination is subject to a large uncertainty and it is difficult to assess its amount of accuracy. To a large extent the problem is statistical and the previous statistical proposals suffer from serious drawbacks. For instance, they rest, at least partially, on assumptions or conventions rather than actual data or use the name of Bayes without implementing a genuine Bayesian procedure. Instead, we present an actual Bayesian procedure resting not only on reference data (as all previous proposals) but also on data that permit to estimate the age distribution of the subjects submitted to examination in a given context. The method provides estimates of the civil age with their precision under the form of a probability density. It is ethic since it estimates the global behaviour of the examined subjects without prejudging anything about it (e.g. with respect to the alleged age). The method is illustrated by a real-life case (data gathered in the Department of Forensic Medicine, Jean-Verdier Hospital, Bondy, France, from 2017 to 2020). We used data from hand/wrist radiographs but the presented approach could be applied to data from any other anatomical site.

With greater availability of post-mortem computed tomography (PMCT), the Brooks and Suchey method is frequently applied in medico-legal contexts using 3D reconstructions of the pubic symphysis. The scientific literature contains reference samples constructed from either dry bones (autopsy series) or 3D reconstructions (virtual samples). This study aims to evaluate the impact of reference sample nature (dry bone vs. virtual bone) on age estimation, based on an analysis of the pubic symphysis from different origins (dry bone vs. 3D reconstruction). This study involved a test sample of pubic symphyses, from which 3D reconstructions were obtained by scanning. We estimated the age of these individuals by comparing their pubic symphyses (derived from both dry bones and 3D reconstructions of the same individuals, and staged accordingly) against two distinct reference samples: the original Bone Reference Sample (BRS) by Brooks and Suchey, and a more recently published Virtual Reference Sample (VRS). The percentages of correct age estimates suggest no significant influence from the reference sample's nature. For younger individuals, inaccuracy values reveal a lower age estimation error when utilizing the BRS reference sample. Furthermore, bias values show an overestimation. For older individuals (> 40), the nature of the reference sample does not seem to improve the estimation. However, according to age groups, bias values seem to be less underestimated with the VRS reference sample. We can conclude that, regardless of the nature of the specimen, the BRS sample appears to improve age estimation for younger individuals. However, there seems to be no benefit to using a virtual sample for a 3D specimen. Furthermore, the age structure of the reference samples is an important factor to consider.