Towards virtual forensic anthropology : Methodological and practical issues related to the use of clinical computed tomography (CT) data

Most European countries lack contemporary collections and are thus unable to develop or test forensic anthropological methods. Specifically, in the Netherlands, due to legislation and the high mean age of bodies donated to the body donation, compiling a skeletal collection that is representative of the current population in the Netherlands is not a possibility. A solution to the lack of representative skeletal population samples could be the use of clinical radiological data (such as computed tomography (CT) scans) as a proxy for skeletal collections. The data from these scans might be used to build a contemporary virtual skeletal database as the data acquired is of known demographics, representative of a contemporary, residing population, and is immediately available. Ultimately, the success of a virtual skeletal database derived from clinical CT scans, depends greatly on the precise modelling of the virtual bone models from the CT images, and the accuracy with which these models represent their actual dry bone counterparts. This presentation therefore focuses on the use of 3D virtual bone models derived from clinical CT scans, and the precision and accuracy of these models. Precision concerns the reliability of virtual bones models derived from clinical CT scan data, while accuracy assesses how well the virtual bones match the actual dry bones. Since forensic anthropology estimation methods are usually based on morphological (shape) or osteometric (size) features, the accuracy is explored for both these approaches.