Many current methods of age determination available to forensic anthropologists are limiting in that the age ranges provided are often broad, particularly for individuals in their late teens to early 20's. This study introduces an improved method for aging teenagers and young adults. The pattern and stages of union of the superior and inferior epiphyses of the vertebral centra (or ring epiphyses) were examined in 55 individuals, females and males, black and white, between ages 11 and 32 years.
Vertebral ring epiphyseal union was found to be a good predictor of age. The correlation between stages of union and known age was 0.78 (P < .0001). The standard deviation was 2.566 years at the 99.9% confidence level. Sex differences were observed, but were not statistically significant. A larger sample size may perhaps demonstrate statistically significant differences in sex, and may or may not yield differences in race. A preliminary interobserver bias test showed high replicability. Results of this study compare favorably with results of other aging studies.
Current age information for the progress of vertebral ring epiphyseal union is supplied for young males—and for the first time—females. This improved aging method provides necessary corroborative information for use with observations from other skeletal age indicators. Data collected from epiphyseal union of the vertebral centra aid in lessening the gap for early adult age determination.
This study examined the efficacy of bilateral asymmetry in epiphyseal union as an indicator of environmental stress affecting the skeleton. We compared the extent of asymmetry in the postcranial skeleton between two cemetery samples excavated from Medieval Kulubnarti, Sudanese Nubia. Past studies have strongly suggested that these ancient Nubians experienced environmental stress-the early Christian period (550-750 AD) population to a greater extent than the late Christian period (750-1450 AD) population. We hypothesized that if bilateral asymmetry is a reflection of stress, then it should be present or greater in the more stressed population, the early Christian period population, while absent or found to a lesser extent in the less stressed population, the late Christian period population. We computed two mean values, representative of right-side and left-side epiphyseal union, for each individual in both cemetery samples, and tested for significant differences. Bilateral asymmetry was significant in the combined cemetery sample of 90 individuals (P < 0.019). When cemetery samples were tested separately, bilateral asymmetry was significant for the early Christian period sample (P < 0.001), but not for the late Christian period sample. There were no differences attributable to sex. Finally, we discuss why we conclude that environmental stress was favored over a biomechanic explanation as the cause for asymmetry. To the extent that our results support previous findings that early Christian period individuals were more affected by environmental stress than late Christian period individuals, it is reasonable to consider bilateral asymmetry in skeletal growth and maturation a good indicator of environmental stress.
This paper introduces a novel face recognition problem domain: the medically altered face for gender transformation. A data set of >1.2 million face images was constructed from wild videos obtained from You Tube of 38 subjects undergoing hormone replacement therapy (HRT) for gender transformation over a period of several months to three years. The HRT achieves gender transformation by severely altering the balance of sex hormones, which causes changes in the physical appearance of the face and body. This paper explores that the impact of face changes due to hormone manipulation and its ability to disguise the face and hence, its ability to effect match rates. Face disguise is achieved organically as hormone manipulation causes pathological changes to the body resulting in a modification of face appearance. This paper analyzes and evaluates face components versus full face algorithms in an attempt to identify regions of the face that are resilient to the HRT process. The experiments reveal that periocular face components using simple texture-based face matchers, local binary patterns, histogram of gradients, and patch-based local binary patterns out performs matching against the full face. Furthermore, the experiments reveal that a fusion of the periocular using one of the simple texture-based approaches (patched-based local binary patterns) out performs two Commercial Off The Shelf Systems full face systems: 1) PittPatt SDK and 2) Cognetic FaceVACs v8.5. The evaluated periocular-fused patch-based face matcher outperforms PittPatt SDK v5.2.2 by 76.83% and Cognetic FaceVACS v8.5 by 56.23% for rank-1 accuracy.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.