Pilot study to establish a nasal tip prediction method from unknown human skeletal remains for facial reconstruction and skull photo superimposition as applied to a Japanese male populations

•We generated the regression equation for nasal tip prediction in facial reconstruction in Japanese.•Our method uses a calculation to predict the nasal tip from two measurements only.•The distance between the point rhi – ANS is almost equal to the prn – line n – gn.•0.77× the distance between the point n – ANS is almost equal to the vertical nasal tip.•The accuracy of this method for Japanese men was demonstrated to be higher than that of the method used in a previous study.

Skull-photo superimposition is a technique used to identify the relationship between the skull and a photograph of a target person: and facial reconstruction reproduces antemortem facial features from an unknown human skull, or identifies the facial features of unknown human skeletal remains. These techniques are based on soft tissue thickness and the relationships between soft tissue and the skull, i.e., the position of the ear and external acoustic meatus, pupil and orbit, nose and nasal aperture, and lips and teeth. However, the ear and nose region are relatively difficult to identify because of their structure, as the soft tissues of these regions are lined with cartilage.We attempted to establish a more accurate method to determine the position of the nasal tip from the skull. We measured the height of the maxilla and mid-lower facial region in 55 Japanese men and generated a regression equation from the collected data. We obtained a result that was 2.0 ± 0.99 mm (mean ± SD) distant from the true nasal tip, when applied to a validation set consisting of another 12 Japanese men.