title: Applicability and limitations of sex assessment based on foramen magnum.
abstract: Sex assessment of skeletal remains in the context of forensic investigation is one of the most important components when constructing biological profile of the deceased individual since it helps to significantly narrow down the number of potential victims. Therefore, the number of methods suitable to estimate sex should be as wide as possible, especially for cases of highly fragmented remains. This paper offers a classification method for sexing human remains based on an area around foramen magnum and tests other similar discriminatory functions published elsewhere on an independent sample from the circummediterranean region. We provide discriminant and logistic regression functions for several sets of variable combinations derived from head CT images. None of the functions performs reliably enough to be used in the forensic context. The same holds true for other discriminatory functions published in the literature. For most of the functions, the failure rate (its inability to successfully assign sex of an unknown individual) reaches 100%. Thus, despite the fact that foramen magnum is sexually dimorphic in most populations, its use in sexing cranial remains in the forensic context should be limited only to cases in which we know population affinity of unknown skeletal remains and can provide referential data from the same population to estimate sex.
authors.affiliation: Department of Anthropology, University of West Bohemia, 30614 Plzeň, Czech Republic.
authors.forename: Zbyšek
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Seifert
authors.affiliation: Department of Anthropology, University of West Bohemia, 30614 Plzeň, Czech Republic. Electronic address: lukas.friedl@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Lukáš
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Friedl
authors.affiliation: Aix-Marseille Université, 13284 Marseille, France; APHM, Hôpital Nord, Medical Imaging Department, 13915 Marseille, France.
authors.forename: Kathia
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Chaumoitre
authors.affiliation: Department of Anthropology and Human Genetics, Charles University in Prague, Prague, Czech Republic; UMR5199 PACEA, Université de Bordeaux, Pessac, France.
authors.forename: Jaroslav
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Brůžek
mesh_terms: D016002:Discriminant Analysis; D005260:Female; D005539:Foramen Magnum / Q000033:anatomy & histology* / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging*; D018732:Forensic Anthropology; D006801:Humans; D016015:Logistic Models; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D054881:Sex Determination by Skeleton / Q000379:methods*; D014057:Tomography, X-Ray Computed
keywords: CT imaging; Discriminant analysis; Foramen magnum; Forensic anthropology population data; Reliability; Sex assessment