THE STUDY OF OSSIFICATION OF THE CLAVICLE TO TEST CHRONOLOGICAL AGE OF OVER 18-YEAR-OLD LIVING SUBJECTS

Nowadays, due to the global increase in migration movements, forensic age estimation of living young adults has become an increasing focus of interest. Many of them came from countries where official documents with exact birth dates are rarely issued. Under these circumstances, establishing the possible minimum age of responsibility is fundamental in order to determine whether juvenile penal systems or penal systems in force for adults are to be applied. The radiological examination of the clavicles is one of the recommended methods by the Study Group on Forensic Age Diagnostics. In this retrospective study, a sample of chest radiographs of 274 subjects, aged between 10 and 25 years, was studied according to Schmeling’s method in order to determine the ossification of the medial clavicular epiphyses. All stage classifications were evaluated by five examiners. The intra- and interobserver reliability was analysed by Cohen’s K statistics and ROC analysis was carried out to determine the accuracy of the examiner’s ability to correctly estimate age as younger or older than 18 years. The inter-observer reproducibility was not good with K statistic (95 % confidence interval) at K00.364 (0.314, 0.415). When stage 3 were chosen as cut-off, the ROC curves showed their points nearest the position (1.0) of the graph, pointing out that the test with cut-off stage 3 yield both a high sensitivity and specificity. If a late stage 3 is found, it is therefore possible to substantiate that an individual has already reached the legally important age threshold of 18 years.