Abstract

Background: The field of forensics utilizes various craniofacial structures and skull in identifying an unknown deceased victim. 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 an age of an individual and this is widely used in forensics for investing 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.

Aim and Objectives: 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.

Methodology: 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 which 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 gender. 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.

Results: The multivariate regression analysis done for estimating age among the given groups of samples using upper canine gave statistically highly significant p value of 0.001,0.004 and 0.039 for group I (20-35 years), group II (36-50 years) and group III (51-65 years) respectively. The regression analysis done using upper first molar for age estimation gave statistically highly significant p value of 0.001 for group I, whereas group II and group III gave out insignificant results. The comparative analysis between multivariate Regression analysis for age estimation of upper canine and upper first molar to determine which tooth index has more specificity, gave statistically significant results for canine samples in all age groups. The samples were also analysed for Pearson correlation in estimating age, which resulted in high correlation in group I samples for both canine and first molar, moderate correlation for group II and group III samples for canine pulp volumes and low correlation for group II and group III for molar pulp volumes.

Conclusion: Over the years, CBCT has evolved a lot and today they are being used in various sectors of dentistry. In the field of forensics, various oral and maxillofacial structures are being used as an adjuvant in personnel identification with more precision using cone beam CT. The results of the present study show statistically highly significant correlation between age and upper canine samples in all the age groups analysed. Hence, based on the results of present study, the upper canine can be used as a promising adjuvant tool in forensic odontology for age estimation.

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