Age estimation from mandibular angle and oral findings on three-dimensional computed tomography

Abstract

skeletal, and burned bodies. From these bodies, the maxilla and mandible, along with teeth, often remain and are therefore commonly used for age estimation. However, reports indicate that the estimated age differs as a result of subjective judgments made when using various age estimation methods. In addition, the mandibular angle has been reported to increase with age. There have been some reports of age estimation from mandibular angle in children, but, to our best knowledge, there have been no reports in adults in the field of forensic odontology. We designed a new age estimation method based on the measured mandibular angle and oral findings (e.g., the numbers of remaining and treated teeth) from three-dimensional computed tomography images, using the following formula : estimated age ＝ 0.6 × (mandi-bular angle) − 0.7 × (number of remaining teeth) − 0.3 × (number of treated teeth). In a compara-tive analysis, age was found to correlate positively with the mandibular angle and negatively with the numbers of remaining and treated teeth. The overall age estimation error with this method was 7.4 ± 5.4 years. No significant differences were observed with respect to sex.