Sex assessment from the pelvis: a test of the Phenice (1969) and Klales et al. (2012) methods.

Sex assessment is one of the first steps of routine forensic anthropological examinations and it provides a crucial element to identify a set of human skeletal remains. In bioarchaeological contexts, this assessment is also important, as it helps in the reconstruction of past societies. Sex determination can be achieved by using several morphological or metric traits of the skull and postcranial skeleton, which have been found to have varying degrees of accuracy. In 1969 Phenice proposed a methodology focusing on three traits located on the pubis. These traits were described as either having a female or male morphology with ambiguity being rare. Phenice's method became regularly utilized as it was considered to be reliable. In 2012, Klales and colleagues published a revision of Phenice's method, as they found that it did not capture the variation in the expression of the three traits. Klales and co-authors created a visual ordinal scale of 1-5 for each of the three traits Phenice originally identified, thus adding three extra possible forms of expression. The purpose of the present research was to test both the original and revised methodologies on the same skeletal population in order to evaluate their suitability for the assessment of sex. The Luís Lopes Anthropological collection in Lisbon was used; 117 males and 117 females were scored using both methodologies. The results showed that the original method performed better (96.5% accuracy) than the revised method (92.7%).

Delineation of temporal bone anatomy: feasibility of low-dose 64-row CT in regard to image quality.

The aim of our present study was to evaluate the visualization of anatomical landmarks of the temporal bone using a low-dose 64-slice computed tomography (CT) technique. A total of 120 patients were evaluated, 60 patients (mean age 47.1 years; 36 male, 24 female) underwent examination with a 4-slice CT scanner: 180 mAs, 120 kV, 1 s rotation time, 2 x 0.5 mm collimation, 0.5 mm slice thickness. Another 60 consecutive patients (mean age 37.4 years; 43 male, 37 female) were examined using a 64-slice CT low-dose protocol: 140 mAs, 120 kV, 1 s rotation time, 12 x 0.6 mm collimation, 0.6 mm slice thickness. The visibility of 42 landmarks was scored by two blinded radiologists using a five-point quality rating scale. Mean equivalent dose was significantly lower for the 64-slice CT protocol (0.31 mSv +/- 0.12 mSv) compared to the 4-slice CT protocol (0.61 mSv +/- 0.08 mSv). Despite increased image noise, only 19% of the anatomical landmarks were delineated significantly better on the axial sections of the 4-slice CT and only 9.5% of the anatomical landmarks on the reformatted coronal images. The interobserver agreement did not differ significantly between the two modalities. Low-dose 64-slice CT technique facilitates temporal bone imaging with sufficient anatomical detail.