Thanks to technical progress and the availability of virtual data, sex estimation methods as part of a biological profile are undergoing an inevitable evolution. Further reductions in subjectivity, but potentially also in measurement errors, can be brought by approaches that automate the extraction of variables. Such automatization also significantly accelerates and facilitates the specialist's work. The aim of this study is (1) to apply a previously proposed algorithm (Kuchař et al. 2021) to automatically extract 10 variables used for the DSP2 sex estimation method, and (2) to test the robustness of the new automatic approach in a current heterogeneous population. For the first aim, we used a sample of 240 3D scans of pelvic bones from the same individuals, which were measured manually for the DSP database. For the second aim a sample of 108 pelvic bones from the New Mexico Decedent Image Database was used. The results showed high agreement between automatic and manual measurements with rTEM below 5% for all dimensions except two. The accuracy of final sex estimates based on all 10 variables was excellent (error rate 0.3%). However, we observed a higher number of undetermined individuals in the Portuguese sample (25% of males) and the New Mexican sample (36.5% of females). In conclusion, the procedure for automatic dimension extraction was successfully applied both to a different type of data and to a heterogeneous population.

CNRS Univ Bordeaux MCC UMR 5199 PACEA Bâtiment B8 Allée Geoffroy Saint Hilaire Pessac Cedex CS 50023 33615 France

Department of Anatomy Faculty of Medicine in Hradec Králové Charles University Šimkova 870 Hradec Králové 500 03 Czech Republic

Department of Anthropology and Human Genetics Faculty of Science Charles University Viničná 7 Prague 2 128 44 Czech Republic

Department of Life Sciences Centre for Functional Ecology Laboratory of Forensic Anthropology University of Coimbra Calçada Martim de Freitas Coimbra 3000 456 Portugal

Institute of New Technologies and Applied Informatics Faculty of Mechatronics Informatics and Interdisciplinary Studies Technical University of Liberec Studentská 1402 2 Liberec 461 17 Czech Republic

Instituto Nacional de Medicina Legal e Ciências Forenses IP Lisboa Portugal

Int J Legal Med. 2024 Nov;138(6):2739. doi: 10.1007/s00414-024-03311-2. PubMed

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