Review on techniques in determination of age and gender of bone using forensic anthropology

Abstract

This paper addresses a review on techniques in determine age and gender of bone using Forensic Anthropology. Forensic anthropology is an application of science of natural anthropology and human osteology in a legal environment, usually in criminal cases where the body's remains are in the stages of decomposition. A forensic anthropologist can help in the recognition of dead persons whose remains are burned, decomposed, unrecognizable or otherwise mutilated. The bone that is always used to determine age is hand-wrist while the bone to determine gender is pelvic bone. There are some problems in forensic anthropology when it involved real data. We need more sample data to make the technique more accurate to determine age and gender. The other problem is the standard atlas used as a reference to determine age is developed based on physical measurement of people in United Kingdom and North American. Therefore, for cases out of those regions, there are no guarantees that the results produced are ascertained accurately due to differences with the standard atlas. Techniques that have been developed to determine age are Tanner Whitehouse standard, Greulich-Pyle method, FELS method and Ultrasonography method while techniques to determine gender are Metric analysis and Magnetic Resonance imaging analysis. The review of this paper will produce the best technique to determine age and gender.