Comparing discriminant analysis and neural network for the determination of sex using femur head measurements

•The femoral head measurements of the modern French population are described.•The head of male femurs are larger than those of female femurs.•Femoral head measurement as a single variable is useful for sex determination.•The best accuracy obtained is 96.5%.

The measurement of the femoral head is usually considered an interesting variable for the sex determination of skeletal remains. To date, there are few published reference measurements of the femoral head in a modern European population for the purpose of sex determination. In this study, 116 femurs from 58 individuals of the South of France (Nice Bone Collection, Nice, France) were studied. Three measurements of the femoral head were taken: the vertical head diameter (VHD), the transversal head diameter (THD) and the head circumference (HC). The results show that: (i) there is no statistical difference between the right and left femurs for each of the three measurements (VHD, THD and HC). Therefore we arbitrarily chose to use the measures from the right femurs (N = 58) to pursue our experiments; (ii) the measurements of the femoral head are similar to those of contemporary American populations; (iii) the dimensions of the femoral head place the measurements of the French population somewhere between Germany or Croatia, and Spain; (iv) there is no significant secular trend (in contrast with the femoral neck diameter); (v) the femoral head measurement as a single variable is useful for sex determination: a 96.5% rate of accuracy was obtained using THD and HC measurements with the artificial neural network; and a 94.8% rate of accuracy using VHD, both with the discriminant analysis and the neural network.