Pulp Volume - An In-depth Tool in Age Estimation- A Comparative Retrospective Forensic Based Cone Beam CT Study
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.48165/jiafm.2024.46.2.16Keywords:
Pulp volume, CBCT, Oral and maxillofacial radiology, Forensic odontology, Age estimationAbstract
The field of forensic utilizes various cranio-facial structures and skull in identifying an unknown deceased. This identification deals with assessing the gender and age of skeletonized remains based on eliciting the ethnicity of the population at archaeological sites and comparison of post-mortem records with the presumed antemortem records. Interestingly, even a single tooth can be used to assess the age of an individual and this is widely used in forensic for investigating legal matters as well as in scientific research purpose. Teeth are resistant to environmental insults and post-mortem decomposition and hence can be retained without distortion. The objective of this study is to analyse the volumetric data of canine and first molars in cone beam CT for estimating age among samples of various age groups and to compare between those values to evaluate which tooth indexed volumetric data gives more specificity in age estimation. It is a retrospective Institutional based Forensic study conducted using 180 samples from 90 full skull CBCT images whose age ranged between 20-65 years, acquired from the dental archives of department of Oral Medicine and Radiology were are equally divided among both genders. Further the samples were categorized into three groups as (20-35), (36-50) and (51-65) years in both the genders. All data samples were assessed using the ITK –SNAP 3.8.0 software. Using semi-automatic active contour segmentation method, the volumes of pulps of upper canine and upper first molar were analysed and calculated data were statistically analysed using discriminant functional analysis and multivariate regression analysis to evaluate the correlation of pulp volumes with respect to chronological age.
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