Possibility of Human Gender Recognition Using Raman Spectra of Teeth

• Published in: Molecules (Basel, Switzerland) Vol. 26; no. 13; p. 3983
• Main Authors: Gamulin, Ozren, Škrabić, Marko, Serec, Kristina, Par, Matej, Baković, Marija, Krajačić, Maria, Babić, Sanja Dolanski, Šegedin, Nikola, Osmani, Aziz, Vodanović, Marin
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Basel MDPI AG 29.06.2021; MDPI
• Subjects: Age; Algorithms; Archives & records; artificial neural network; Classification; Datasets; Dentistry; Females; forensic dentistry; Gender; Human remains; Investigations; Legal medicine; Males; Mastication; Molars; Molecular structure; Morphology; multivariate statistical methods; Neural networks; Premolars; principal component analysis; Principal components analysis; Raman spectra; Raman spectroscopy; Recognition; Recording; support vector machine; Support vector machines; Teeth; United States > US
• ISSN: 1420-3049; 1420-3049
• DOI: 10.3390/molecules26133983

Gender determination of the human remains can be very challenging, especially in the case of incomplete ones. Herein, we report a proof-of-concept experiment where the possibility of gender recognition using Raman spectroscopy of teeth is investigated. Raman spectra were recorded from male and female molars and premolars on two distinct sites, tooth apex and anatomical neck. Recorded spectra were sorted into suitable datasets and initially analyzed with principal component analysis, which showed a distinction between spectra of male and female teeth. Then, reduced datasets with scores of the first 20 principal components were formed and two classification algorithms, support vector machine and artificial neural networks, were applied to form classification models for gender recognition. The obtained results showed that gender recognition with Raman spectra of teeth is possible but strongly depends both on the tooth type and spectrum recording site. The difference in classification accuracy between different tooth types and recording sites are discussed in terms of the molecular structure difference caused by the influence of masticatory loading or gender-dependent life events.