Former MSc Human Anatomy student Qiudian Wang and her supervisors Sameer Dhumale and Abduelmenem Alashkham have presented their work at the British Association of Clinical Anatomists conference in which the ability to determine the sex of a mandible is critical for forensic and anthropologic investigation. Here, the function of sex determination is fixed on one population only, due to the influence of populational variation on sex being severe. This study aimed to determine sex focus on Malay and Indian mandibles due to a lack of existing research on these populations. Measurements of bi-condylar breadth, bi-gonial breadth, bi-mental foramina breadth, bi-antegonial breadth, maximum ramus breadth, maximum condylar breath, maximum coronoid breath, maximum mandibular length, maximum mandibular ramus height and length, maximum mandibular body length and breadth, mandibular and mental angles tangent, and length and depth of mandibular ramus flexures were taken from 100 (34 Malay, 66 Indian) mandibles which are from Edinburgh University skull collection. Linear discriminant analysis and orthogonal partial least squares discriminant analysis were used to acquire discriminant function and refine the selection of indicators, with a P value <0.05 considered to be statistically significant. The accuracy of sex determination in Malay and Indian mandibles were 97.10% and 98.5% respectively with a ramus flexure being the best common sex indicator selected for both populations. In conclusion, sex determination of Malay and Indian mandibles can be highly accurate when using multi-parameters and metric approaches. Publication date 06 Jan, 2020
