ABSTRACT

Estimation of dental age is an unavoidable procedure in the clinical work of every dentist, forensic analyzes in obtaining data on the age of cadavers and in archaeological analyzes on exhumed skeletal remains.

The purpose of this project is to determine the dental age in different age groups of recent man as well as on archaeological samples of teeth and jaws from prehistory and from the period of the early Middle Ages and late antiquity.

Sample collection will be based on the extracted teeth of patients in compliance with ethical protocols and their incorporation into the acrylic mass and observation and measurement of the thickness of dental cement under a microscope. With this aim, an attempt will be made to determine the correlation between the known chronological age and the achieved dental age.

Determination of dental age in children and adolescents will be determined by analysis from the collection of orthopantomogram images of the Department of Dental Anthropology. The collected collection of orthopantomograms will be classified into age groups and based on the developmental stages of the roots of permanent teeth, an attempt will be made to achieve a correlation between the known chronological age and the achieved dental age.

Orthopantomograms will be used to populate the database in the development of artificial intelligence programs. Sexual dimorphism on the permanent teeth of a recent man will also be determined using the ASUDAS method.

The assessment of dental age will also be determined on the archaeological collections of teeth from the archives of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, and the collection dates from the early Middle Ages and late antiquity. On the mentioned sample, the wear of dental surfaces and edges will be measured using the computer program VistaMetrix, and the achieved dental age will be correlated with the known bone age of the samples. The second part of the archaeological material is the collection of the Vela Luka Cultural Center, and is based on exhumed dental remains from the Kopila necropolis from the time of IVth - 1st century BC. Stable 14C, Strontium, 15N isotopes will be analyzed on the mentioned sample from prehistory in order to determine the age of the samples and the diet of the then inhabitants of Blato. Efforts will also be made to determine metric and non-metric dental variables that indicate the lifestyle, gender and age of the natives of the island of Korcula.

We expect that the achieved results will help in the daily work of dentists, clinicians, forensic scientists and anthropologists in determining dental age.