Sex estimation of the tibia in modern Turkish: a Computed Tomography study

The utilization of computed tomography is beneficial for the analysis of skeletal remains and it has important advantages for anthropometric studies. The present study investigated morphometry of left tibia using CT images of a contemporary Turkish population. Seven parameters were measured on 203 individuals (124 males and 79 females) within the 19-92-years age group. The first objective of this study was to provide population-specific sex estimation equations for the contemporary Turkish population based on CT images. A second objective was to test the sex estimation formulae on Southern Europeans by Kranioti and Apostol (2015). Univariate discriminant functions resulted in classification accuracy that ranged from 66 to 86%. The best single variable was found to be upper epiphyseal breadth (86%) followed by lower epiphyseal breadth (85%). Multivariate discriminant functions resulted in classification accuracy for cross-validated data ranged from 79 to 86%. Applying the multivariate sex estimation formulae on Southern Europeans (SE) by Kranioti and Apostol in our sample resulted in very high classification accuracy ranging from 81 to 88%. In addition, 35.5-47% of the total Turkish sample is correctly classified with over 95% posterior probability, which is actually higher than the one reported for the original sample (25-43%). We conclude that the tibia is a very useful bone for sex estimation in the contemporary Turkish population. Moreover, our test results support the hypothesis that the SE formulae are sufficient for the contemporary Turkish population and they can be used safely for criminal investigations when posterior probabilities are over 95%.