Use shape simulator to recreate the olecranon fossa of a humerus you are analysing. Change triangularity and concavity until they closely resemble your individual's shape as much as possible. Below the LDA model gives you the probability of your individual being a male or a female based on the visual criteria you simulated. Here, the method works like a morphoscopic/visual scoring method, but in a continuous scale.
This decision support system is freely provided as an aid for profiling skeletal material. Osteomics has no responsibility for its ultimate use or misuse. While Osteomics tries to ensure the software is theoretically grounded and statically accurate, we provide no warranty and make no specific claims as to its performance or its appropriateness for use in any particular situation. If a paper is available for any of our tools, please read it before applying the method. Always keep in mind: you are the expert, these tools are just decision support systems. They do not have the final word.
Saskia Ammer, João d'Oliveira Coelho, Eugénia M. Cunha
Available at DOI:10.1111/1556-4029.14096
Sex estimation through visual analysis of the distal humerus can contribute to establishing the biological profile of an unidentified skeletal individual. Using statistical shape modeling, the trochlear constriction open curves and olecranon fossa closed outlines of 151 humeri were digitized and analyzed. The shape configurations exhibited strikingly different degrees of sexual dimorphism when evaluated using linear discriminant analysis with leave-one-out cross-validation. The trochlear constriction performed poorly, correctly classifying 63.6% of the individuals. However, the olecranon fossa showed high sexual dimorphism, presenting a 94.0% accuracy. A simpler model using only two principal components was also generated. While the accuracy is slightly inferior (88.1%), it has the advantage of being constrained to bidimensional components that were translated into morphoscopic variables within a simulator interface. This allowed us to implement the method through a web-application that does not require users to be trained in landmark digitization or have knowledge of geometric morphometrics.
Model developed from a subsample of an osteological collection of a portuguese population, for more info click here
- 80 female and 71 male distal humeri
Forensic science, forensic anthropology, outline shape analysis, web application, sex estimation, distal humerus