Background: One of the major problems in the medicine is personal identification in cases of skeletal remains. The first step is determination of sex. One of the elements that recently paied more attention to it is the patella. Since the measurements are population specific, so we measured the patellas of Iranians to determine their patellas dimensions for sex prediction.
Methods: In this study three metrical characteristics of patella were measured from 67 corps between 20-64 years refered to the autopasy hall of forensic medicine center in Tehran (L.M.O). For statistical analysis of datas, the statistical product and service solution (SPSS version 16) program was used and unvariate and multivariate discriminant function analysis were performed to indicate the efficiency of each variable for sex determination.
Results: The mean of patella height in male was 4.46 cm and in female was 3.87, the mean of patella width in male was 4.60 and in female was 4.03cm and the mean of patella thickness in male was 2.25 and in female was 2.07cm. Among these measurements maximal width with average accurancy of 94% and then maximal height with 91% and finally maximal thickness with 71.6-73.1% respectively were better variables for sex determination. Also in multivariate discriminant analysis, combination of all three measurements with average accuracy of 94% was the best function for sex determination.
Conclusion: The results of this study revealed that we can determine sex with high confidence in situations such as explosions, air crashes and etc, just by using the patella measurement.