Determination of legal majority age from 3D magnetic resonance images of the radius bone.

The determination of an individual's legal majority age is becoming increasingly important in forensic practice. Established age estimation methods are based on 2D X-rays, but suffer from problems due to projective imaging and exposure to ionizing radiation, which, without proper medical or criminal indication, is ethically questionable and legally prohibited in many countries. We propose an automatic 3D method for the determination of legal maturity from MR images based on the ossification of the radius bone. Age estimation is performed by a linear regression model of the epiphyseal gap volume over the known ground truth age of training data. Results are comparable with the established Greulich/Pyle (GP) and Tanner/Whitehouse (TW) methods, but do not involve harmful radiation.