ИСТИНА

Growth patterns of the human facial skeleton have always been of great interest and importance for biological anthropologists, forensic scientists, craniofacial surgeons, and orthopedists. Nevertheless, growth trends of the facial skeleton in infancy and early childhood are still poorly known and clinical CT data have been insufficiently used for studying craniofacial ontogeny. Our dataset includes 146 high resolution clinical CT datasets of males from the 2nd to 6th years of life and 101 dataset of infants (males) in the 1st year of life. Forty landmarks were collected from each 3D reconstructed skull, then 25 linear measurements describing the morphological features of the facial skeleton were calculated. The measurements display a great diversity of growth patterns, and their correlation structure is different at different ages. Further, our results have shown that cranial metrics can be used to determine the age-at-death in archeological sub-adult individuals. Finally, growth trajectories of the midfacial variables were compared with those of body dimensions (stature, weight, chest circumference etc). It was found that the trajectory of the chest circumference was virtually identical during the first year of life to those of the nasal height and choanal height, i.e. size of the nasal cavity.