Dimension reduction for characterizing sexual dimorphism in biomechanics of the temporomandibular joint
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Sexual dimorphism is a critical factor in many biological and medical research fields. In biomechanics and bioengineering, understanding sex differences is crucial for studying musculoskeletal conditions such as temporomandibular disorder. This paper focuses on the association between the craniofacial skeletal morphology and temporomandibular joint related masticatory muscle attachments to discern sex differences. Data were collected from 11 female and 10 male cadaver heads to investigate sex-specific relationships between the skull and muscles. We propose a conditional cross-covariance reduction (CCR) model, designed to examine the dynamic association between two sets of random variables conditioned on a third binary variable (e.g., sex), highlighting the most distinctive sex-related relationships between skull and muscle attachments in the human cadaver data. Under the CCR model, we employ a sparse singular value decomposition algorithm. We further introduce a sequential permutation for selecting sparsity method to identify important variables and determine the optimal number of selected variables.
Source: Biometrics
Language: English
Subfield: Statistics and Probability
Field: Mathematics
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
Awards: Multimodal Integrative Dimension Reduction and Statistical Modeling with Applications to Temporomandibular Joint (TMJ) Morphometry and Biomechanics, Integrating craniofacial morphology, oral function, temporomandibular biomechanics and mechanobiology to determine sex-specific TMJ pathophysiology in humans
OpenAlex ID: W4414804984