Investigating Sexual Dimorphism of the Human Mandible in Indian Population Using Geometric Morphometric Method

Sex determination by morphological analyses of the mandible is especially important in forensic anthropology and bioarchaeology cases where the bones are still present in fragments. The present research utilises recent developments in geometric morphometrics (GMM) to examine the degree to which the mandible could be used as a tool for sex determination. Two-dimensional landmarks and semi-landmarks were plotted on 149 digital orthopantomograms of both genders between the age group of 18–50 years. Through a multivariate analytical and exploratory framework, incorporating coordinates-based method and supervised classificatory techniques, morphological changes were identified to be consistent with sex. Overall sex determination accuracy was found to be 89.3%, while the first 17 principal components (99% shape variance) yielded 93.0% accuracy. The accuracy for males was 89.3% Procrustes coordinates and 94% principal components, whereas for females was 89.2% Procrustes coordinates and 91.9% principal components. The findings of this research were highly optimistic, supporting previous studies, and suggest that this approach may be utilised to assess sexual dimorphism. The approach of geometric morphometric method proves to be a very useful tool to determine sexual dimorphism.