Age Prediction Using Pixel Value Sum from Radiographic Proximal Femur in a Thai Population

The present study aimed to investigate the utility of the proximal femur in the forensic age estimation by assessing changes in bone densities through radiographs. Using Otsu's threshold, bone density was quantified by counting all whitevalues pixel within selected regions of interest, which include femoral head (FH), femoral neck (FN), Ward's triangle (WT), and greaterhaner troc (GT) from 354 left femora of Northern Thai descent. The pixel width of medullary cavity (MC) was also estimated. Furthermore,he t study evaluated the performance of linear regression (LR) models for age estimation from radiographic images of proximal. femora Negative correlations were observed between FH, FN, WT, and GT pixel intensity with the age-at-death of the samples, withes femal exhibiting stronger correlations than males. Moreover, a positive correlation was found between age and MC width in female samples, while male MC widths did not show any relationship with increasing age. The results showed a slight difference between theodel LR m applied to both sexes, which integrated all variables, and the alternative configuration that only utilized relevant . Bothattributesmodels exhibited similar performance, with a narrow range of root mean square error (RMSE) values, ranging from 12.67 to 12.71 and ayears, correlation coefficient range of 0.51 to 0.52. For females, the LR model with FN and WT as selected attributes (RMSE = 1ars,1.85 ye correlation coefficient = 0.65) performed decently, while for males, the LR model with all variables showed RMSE of 12.52 andyears correlation coefficient of 0.46. This study showcased the potential application of pixel intensity in predicting age.