Age estimation in infant and prenatal individuals through the metric development of the pars petrosa and squamosal portion of the temporal bone.

This study proposes an assessment of the accuracy of the Fazekas and Kósa and Nagaoka methods by measuring the squamosal and petrous portions of the temporal bone, whose application in the Mediterranean population is not recommended. Therefore, our proposal is a new formula to estimate the age of skeletal remains from individuals at 5 months gestational age to 1.5 postnatal years with the temporal bone. The proposed equation was calculated on a Mediterranean sample identified from the cemetery of San José, Granada (n = 109). The mathematical model used is the exponential regression of the estimated age for each measure and sex, and both in combination, using an inverse calibration and cross-validation model. In addition, the estimation errors and the percentage of individuals within a 95% confidence interval were calculated. The lateral development of the skull, especially the growth of the length of the petrous portion, showed the greatest accuracy, while its counterpart, the width of the pars petrosa, showed the lowest accuracy, so its use is discouraged. The positive results from this paper should be useful in both forensic and bioarchaeological contexts.

Discriminant functions for sex estimation using the rib necks in a Spanish population.

One of the first steps in the identification of human remains is sex estimation. Discriminant functions are very useful for this purpose, as they are based on the fundamental premise of the sexual dimorphism in osseous remains. However, the absence of studies of this kind in the thoracic cage is visible, and adequate cause to justify this work. To this purpose, we analysed and measured a set of ribs, R1 to R4, belonging to skeletons of contemporary chronology (1970-2010), in order to obtain discriminant functions enabling sex estimation through equations applied to the rib neck. The sample comes from the Cemetery of San José, which is located at the Laboratory of Anthropology at the University of Granada. All data from this sample was known: ancestry, sex, age-at-death and cause of death. Results showed a percentage of success of approximately 80-88% in ribs R2 to R4, and approximately 85-90% in R1, reaching up to 93.2%. Results from intra-/inter-observer error tests show excellent reproducibility of the method. The data confirms that it is possible to estimate sex from the rib neck.

On the noninvasive optical monitoring and differentiation of methemoglobinemia and sulfhemoglobinemia.

There are several pathologies whose study and diagnosis is impaired by a relatively small number of documented cases. A practical approach to overcome this obstacle and advance the research in this area consists in employing computer simulations to perform controlled in silico experiments. The results of these experiments, in turn, may be incorporated in the design of differential protocols for these pathologies. Accordingly, in this paper, we investigate the spectral responses of human skin affected by the presence of abnormal amounts of two dysfunctional hemoglobins, methemoglobin and sulfhemoglobin, which are associated with two life-threatening medical conditions, methemoglobinemia and sulfhemoglobinemia, respectively. We analyze the results of our in silico experiments and discuss their potential applications to the development of more effective noninvasive monitoring and differentiation procedures for these medical conditions.

Rapid dissemination of light transport models on the web.

Light transport models are employed in applications in such varied areas as realistic image synthesis, noninvasive treatment of diseases, and remote sensing of natural resources. Openly accessible research resources can lead to significant advances involving these applications by fostering the cross-fertilization of different scientific disciplines. However, few light transport models have their source code openly available for download. Moreover, simply making the code available might not be enough; these models' complexity usually prevents their use beyond the research groups that developed them. The NPSGD (Natural Phenomena Simulation Group Distributed) framework makes light transport models easily accessible for online use. NPSGD acts a front end, connecting model implementations to the Web. It lets researchers perform predictive and time-intensive light transport simulations in a user-friendly, fault-tolerant way. More important, as a proof of concept, NPSGD demonstrates that the reproducibility of research results through model transparency is feasible. Such reproducibility can result in fruitful collaborations between model developers and users, regardless of their field of expertise.