Nose profile morphology and accuracy study of nose profile estimation method in Scottish subadult and Indonesian adult populations

摘要

This study investigated nose profile morphology and its relationship to the skull in Scottish sub adult and Indonesian adult populations, with the aim of improving the accuracy of forensic craniofacial reconstruction. Samples of 86 lateral head cephalograms from Dundee Dental School (mean age 11.8 years) and 335 lateral head cephalograms from Universitas Padjadjaran Dental Hospital Bandung Indonesia (mean age 24.2 years) were measured. The method of nose profile estimation based on skull morphology previously proposed by Rynn and colleagues in 2010 [1] was tested in this study. Following this method, 3 nasal aperture related craniometrics and 6 nose profile dimensions were measured from the cephalograms. To assess the accuracy of the method, 6 nose profile dimensions were estimated from the 3 craniometric parameters using the published method, then compared to the actual nose profile dimensions. In the Scottish sub adult population, no sexual dimorphism was evident in the measured dimensions. In contrast, sexual dimorphism of the Indonesian adult population was evident in all craniometric and nose profile dimensions: notably, males exhibited statistically significant larger values than females. The published method [1] performed better in the Scottish sub adult population (mean difference of maximum 2.35 mm) compared to the Indonesian adult population (mean difference of maximum 5.42 mm in males and 4.89 mm in females).In addition, regression formulae were derived to estimate nose profile dimensions based on the craniometric measurements for the Indonesian adult population. The published method is not sufficiently accurate for use on the Indonesian population, so the derived method should be used. The accuracy of the published method by Rynn and colleagues [1] was sufficiently reliable to be applied in Scottish sub adult population.