Sex Differentiation of Humerus: An Osteometric Study

Abstract

Introduction: Forensic experts and anthropologists often have a task of identification of sex of skeletal remains which is an aspect of the biological profile of an individual. The humerus is among the long bones which have been found to remain in better condition after the death of the individual and can be used for analysis of sex of the individual. Aim: To assess the role of multivariate analysis of humerus metric parameters for sex differentiation of adult male and female humerus. Materials and Methods: The cross-sectional study was done on 176 adult human humeri of known sex from the bone bank of a medical teaching hospital in Marathwada region of Maharashtra in India. Following parameters of each humerus were recorded: weight, maximum length, vertical head diameter, transverse head diameter, circumference of midshaft, length of the shaft of humerus, circumference of head at anatomical neck, circumference of surgical neck, maximum width of upper end of humerus, width of bicipital groove, anteroposterior diameter of midshaft, transverse diameter of midshaft of humerus, biepicondylar distance, trochlear width, capitulum width, width of articular surface of lower end, height of medial flange of trochlea, circumference of shaft distal to deltoid tuberosity, trochlear distance, distance of articular margin from the apex of greater tubercle, distance between the nearest point of margin of lesser tubercle and articular margin of head, length index, and circumference index. “Multivariate linear discriminant analysis” was applied to weight, total length, vertical diameter of head, transverse diameter of the head, and the circumference of midshaft. Results: Total of 176 humeri were studied, 46 female humeri and 130 male humeri. It was observed that 119 of the male and 40 of the female humeri were accurately identified and the total number of humeri identified correctly was 159 out of 176 using the parameters of weight, maximum length, vertical head diameter, transverse head diameter, circumference of midshaft. The accuracy rate was 91.53% for males and 86.95% for females with an overall accuracy of 90.34%. Conclusion: Multivariate analysis of a group of metric parameters can be helpful for identification of sex from the humerus bones with reasonable accuracy.

Keywords

• circumference of midshaft
• transverse diameter of the head
• vertical diameter of the head