engleski

Visibility of epigenetic cranial traits on multi- slice computed tomography (MSCT) scans and dry bones

Epigenetic traits are defined as the expression of genes affecting development. In the fifties of the 20th century, genetic studies conducted on mice showed the epigenetic traits to be the most convenient for determining family relationships and population affiliation as they show high hereditability even though they are partly influenced affected by the environment. Various studies on human crania showed that the frequencies of epigenetic traits could be used for studying biological distances between populations. To examine if MSCT images could be used as a reference for the study of the modern population, we conducted a pilot study in which we compared the visibility of the same 80 epigenetic traits on 40 dry archaeological skulls from two medieval sites, 32 from Velim Velištak (21 males, 11 females) and 8 from Radašinovci (4 males, 4 females) and their MSCT scans. From a total of 80 traits analyzed, we identified 54 (67.5%) of them in the sample. When Cohen`s kappa was calculated, 24 traits showed almost perfect or perfect agreement (K =0.81-0.919), 19 traits showed substantial agreement (K= 0.611 - 0.794), one showed moderate agreement (K=0.588), 5 showed fair agreement (K= 0.281 - 0.557), and 5 showed slight agreement (K= 0.003 - 0.17). The study showed that most identified traits could be analyzed interchangeably on dry bones and CT images. However, some traits showed lower agreement levels, and their application should only be restricted to dry bones. Future studies are required to prove consistency between the two scoring modalities because the prevalence of some traits can be extremely low, thus disabling the comparison.

epigenetic traits, cranium, MSCT, dry bones

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