Publications by authors named "Cristina Figueroa Soto"
Article Synopsis
- Reliable age-at-death estimates using adult skeletons are crucial in forensic anthropology, but traditional methods often rely on population-specific criteria that mostly represent European and African individuals, which may not apply to underrepresented groups like Latinx populations.
- The study utilizes data from skeletal collections of modern Mexican and Puerto Rican individuals, examining both traditional and new computational shape-based techniques to assess their effectiveness for age estimation.
- Findings indicate that while new regression models show some promise, they do not significantly enhance age estimates for Latinx samples, and both traditional and computational techniques exhibit bias and inaccuracy that vary with age brackets.
In an effort to standardize data collection and analysis in age estimation, a series of computational methods utilizing high-dimensional image data of the age indicator have recently been proposed as an alternative to subjective visual, trait-to-phase matching techniques. To systematically quantify the reproducibility of such methods, we investigate the intrascan variability and within- and between-observer reliability in initial scan data capturing and editing using 3D laser scans of the Suchey-Brooks pubic symphysis casts and five shape-based computational methods. Our results show that (i) five observers with various training background and experience levels edited the scans consistently for all three trials and the derived shape measures and age estimates were in excellent agreement among observers, and (ii) the computational methods are robust to a measured degree of scan trimming error.
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