title: Confidence intervals in temperature-based death time determination.
abstract: Marshall and Hoare's double exponential model with Henßge's parameters is a well known method for temperature based death time estimation. The authors give 95%-confidence intervals for their method. Since body cooling is a complex thermodynamical process, one has to take into account a potential bias of the estimator. This quantity measures the systematic error of the estimators underlying model. For confidence interval radius calculation a bias of 0 is presupposed, therefore the actual probability of the true death time value to lie in the 95%-confidence interval can be much lower than 95% in case of nonvanishing bias. As in case of nonstandard conditions the confidence intervals have a probability of containing the true death time value which even in case of small corrective factor errors of Δ = ± 0.1 can be substantially smaller than the 95% claimed, the paper presents a formula for confidence intervals which keep a 95% probability in case of error Δc ⩽ ± 0.1.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Legal Medicine, Jena University Hospital, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany. Electronic address: michael.hubig@med.uni-jena.de.
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Hubig
authors.affiliation: Institute of Legal Medicine, Jena University Hospital, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany.
authors.forename: Holger
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Muggenthaler
authors.affiliation: Institute of Legal Medicine, Jena University Hospital, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany.
authors.forename: Gita
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Mall
mesh_terms: D001831:Body Temperature; D016001:Confidence Intervals; D003643:Death; D005554:Forensic Medicine; D006801:Humans; D011180:Postmortem Changes; D013997:Time Factors
keywords: Bias; Body cooling; Confidence interval; Corrective factor; Henßge model; Marshall and Hoare Model; Time since death