Stature estimation study based on pelvic and sacral morphometric among Malaysian population

Abstract

Background

Virtual anthropology in estimating stature through multislice computed tomography scanning is important for forensic cases and mass disasters. Regression formulae generated directly from other post-cranial skeleton parts can be applied for estimating stature. Literatures have revealed that scoring of pelvic shape in both sexes is significantly correlated with stature. Hereafter, this study aims to correlate the pelvic and sacral morphometric with stature based on sex and ancestry among the Malaysian population from the selected samples of 373 CT images at Kuala Lumpur Hospital. The three-dimensional pelvic girdles were first segmented from CT images through Mimics Research 17.0 software. Inter-landmark distances were measured with Microsoft 3D Builder and their respective indexes were computed.

Results

This study showed that the auricular lengths, ilium dimension and acetabulum were the most useful stature estimator at R > 0.5. The combination of pelvic parameters, sacral parameters and indexes had contributed to a higher R² value of the regression models.

Conclusions

Pelvic morphometric was generally a better stature estimator compared to sacral morphometric. The population-specific formula produced from this study should only be realistic within the Malaysian population. This helps to enhance the existing references for stature estimation especially when incomplete human remains are discovered.