Shoulder Scans Without Radiation: MRI of the Humerus Emerges as a New Tool for Forensic Age Estimation

Every year, courts and immigration authorities around the world face a deceptively simple question with profound consequences: how old is this person? When an unaccompanied minor arrives at a border, or when a defendant claims to be under the age of criminal responsibility, forensic scientists are often asked to estimate chronological age from the body itself. For decades, the standard answer has come from X-rays, typically of the hand and wrist or the clavicle, because bone maturation leaves a readable record of development. But X-rays expose living subjects to ionizing radiation, a practice that sits uneasily with medical ethics when the examination offers no health benefit to the person being scanned. A new study from a team of forensic physicians and radiologists at the University of Montpellier, published in the International Journal of Legal Medicine, adds a significant piece to the puzzle of how age might be assessed without radiation, using magnetic resonance imaging of the shoulder.

The research, led by Oguzhan Ekizoglu together with Marine Dario, Maxime Pastor, Catherine Cyteval, and Laurent Martrille, focused on a bone that has been comparatively neglected in the MRI-based age estimation literature: the proximal humerus, the ball-shaped top of the upper arm bone. While the hand-wrist region and the knee have been extensively mapped with MRI for forensic purposes, the shoulder has received far less systematic attention, particularly in Western European populations. The team retrospectively analyzed 346 shoulder MRI examinations drawn from a French cohort spanning the ages of 7.18 to 33.82 years, comprising 204 males and 142 females. Because the scans had been acquired for clinical reasons and were fully anonymized, the ethics committee of CHU Montpellier approved the study and waived the need for individual informed consent, an approach consistent with the Declaration of Helsinki.

The technical backbone of the study is the combined Schmeling–Kellinghaus staging system, a widely used framework originally developed for the medial end of the collarbone. In this system, ossification of the epiphysis, the secondary growth center that fuses to the main bone shaft after puberty, is graded in discrete stages, from an entirely cartilaginous growth plate through progressive partial fusion to complete union, with an optional subdivision for the earliest signs of fusion. On T1-weighted MRI sequences, the developing bone and the cartilaginous plate between epiphysis and metaphysis produce distinct signal intensities, allowing a trained observer to assign each shoulder to a stage. Two independent raters, blinded to each subject’s age and sex, staged all 346 scans, providing a direct test of how reproducible the method is when applied to the humeral head.

The results were strikingly consistent. The correlation between chronological age and ossification stage was strong and statistically significant across the whole sample, with a Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient of 0.878, and nearly identical values of 0.880 in males and 0.878 in females, all with p-values below 0.001. In practical terms, this means that as the humeral epiphysis progresses through its developmental stages, age increases in a tight, predictable relationship, and that this relationship holds equally well for both sexes. Statistical testing with the Mann–Whitney U method found no significant difference between males and females in the ages associated with any given stage, a finding that simplifies the application of the system, since a single set of stage descriptions may suffice for both sexes in this population.

Reliability, the measure of whether different observers reach the same conclusion from the same image, was equally impressive. Cohen’s kappa, a statistic that quantifies agreement beyond what would be expected by chance, reached 0.911 within observers rating their own scans twice and 0.890 between the two independent raters. Values above 0.8 are conventionally considered to indicate very good agreement, and these figures place the proximal humerus staging on par with, or better than, many established forensic imaging indicators. For a method that might one day inform legal decisions with life-changing consequences, this level of observer agreement is not a technical nicety but an essential prerequisite, because inconsistent readings between experts would undermine the credibility of any age estimate offered in court.

The most legally consequential finding concerns the age of majority, the threshold at 18 years that separates minors from adults in most jurisdictions. In this cohort, the youngest individual showing stage 4, defined by the presence of a visible epiphyseal scar after fusion, was 18.33 years in males and 18.06 years in females. In other words, once the epiphyseal scar is visible on the proximal humerus, the data suggest the person has very likely passed their eighteenth birthday. Notably, stage 5, the final stage of the amplified scheme, was never observed despite the cohort including individuals up to nearly 34 years of age, an observation the authors interpret in light of the persistent visibility of the epiphyseal scar in adult shoulders and the anatomical characteristics of trabecular bone in this region.

Beyond the conventional minimum-age approach, the team applied an ordinal probit transition analysis, a statistical framework borrowed from paleodemography that models the probability of moving from one ossification stage to the next as a function of age. Rather than relying on the single youngest individual observed at a stage, a figure that is highly sensitive to how many older or younger people happen to be in the sample, transition analysis yields sex-specific ages at which the probability of progression to the next stage reaches 50 percent. This provides a more statistically robust characterization of the timing of skeletal maturation and has been increasingly advocated in forensic age research, including recent work on third molars and other skeletal indicators. The authors are careful, however, to stress that both minimum-age and transition-age estimates derived from any single cohort should not be applied as forensic thresholds without independent, population-specific validation, a caution that reflects the well-documented variation in skeletal maturation across populations and socioeconomic conditions.

Perhaps the most original contribution of the study is the description of a previously unreported interpretive pitfall. The authors identified a trabecular hypointense pattern, a dark appearance of the internal bone architecture on T1-weighted images, that can potentially mimic a persistent gap between the epiphysis and the metaphysis, the appearance that would normally indicate an unfused, and therefore juvenile, growth plate. Mistaking this normal variant for an open growth plate could lead an examiner to underestimate a person’s age, with serious implications in asylum or criminal proceedings. The paper includes recommendations for recognizing this pattern, underscoring that even a highly reliable staging system depends on the examiner’s ability to distinguish true developmental landmarks from imaging artifacts and anatomical variants of the cancellous bone in the proximal humerus.

The broader context of this work is a slow but decisive shift in forensic practice. European radiation protection directives and international basic safety standards from bodies such as the International Atomic Energy Agency have sharpened the ethical and legal scrutiny applied to X-ray-based age assessments in healthy young people, pushing researchers toward MRI as a non-ionizing alternative. Previous MRI studies of the proximal humeral epiphysis, including earlier work by Ekizoglu and colleagues on Turkish cohorts and studies from China and Turkey using both 1.5 and 3.0 Tesla scanners, have demonstrated the promise of the approach, but population-specific data remained sparse for Western Europe. By extending the combined Schmeling–Kellinghaus system to a French cohort for the first time, the Montpellier team has filled an important geographic gap and shown that the staging framework travels well across populations, at least in terms of correlation strength and observer reliability.

What remains before shoulder MRI can enter routine forensic use is a matter of validation and standardization rather than proof of concept. Large, independently collected cohorts from different populations will be needed to confirm the minimum ages and transition probabilities reported here, and the newly described trabecular pitfall will need to be characterized across scanner types and imaging protocols. Cost and scanner availability also remain practical constraints, since MRI is more expensive and less widely accessible than plain radiography. Nevertheless, the study offers a compelling vision of the field’s future: a radiation-free, highly reproducible, and anatomically well-characterized method for answering one of forensic science’s most sensitive questions. For the hundreds of thousands of young people whose ages are contested each year in legal systems worldwide, the humeral head, imaged safely with magnets rather than X-rays, may soon become a key witness.

Subject of Research: Non-ionizing forensic age estimation using T1-weighted MRI of the proximal humeral epiphysis in a French cohort

Article Title: T1-Weighted MRI of the proximal humerus: Toward a non-ionizing approach to forensic age estimation in a French cohort

Article References: Ekizoglu, O., Dario, M., Pastor, M., Cyteval, C., & Martrille, L. (2026). T1-Weighted MRI of the proximal humerus: Toward a non-ionizing approach to forensic age estimation in a French cohort. International Journal of Legal Medicine. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00414-026-03996-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s00414-026-03996-7

Keywords: forensic age estimation, MRI, proximal humerus, epiphyseal fusion, Schmeling-Kellinghaus staging, age of majority, transition analysis, non-ionizing imaging, forensic medicine, immigration, radiation protection, French cohort