NCJ Number
204668
Journal
Journal of Forensic Identification Volume: 54 Issue: 2 Dated: March/April 2004 Pages: 185-202
Date Published
March 2004
Length
18 pages
Annotation
This article discusses a comparison of three different methods of matching victims from dental remains in a large disaster.
Abstract
The three methods were the Locator System (LS), WinID3 software program (Win), and CAPMI4 software program (Cap). Win and Cap were designed to help identify disaster victims. LS was not a computer program and required dental professionals to manually sort antemortem files into six categories of dental characteristics. They also had to compare a postmortem file of a given category to antemortem files in the same category. Twenty-four dental professionals were randomly assigned to the 3 methods with 8 per team. The teams worked 5 hours. Actual patient charts were used to simulate 300 antemortem files (victims) and 105 postmortem files (dental fragments) for a fictional disaster. The results showed that the Locator System performed best, WinID3 was a close second-best, and CAPMI4 a distant third. The Locator System did not use a computer, so it is surprising that it performed better than 2 software programs in a large disaster of 300 victims. Perhaps one reason the LS team did so well was that they had divided themselves into specialists for the categories so that each specialist had a relatively small number of files to evaluate. The Locator System performed better than the other methods when few or no dental restorations were present. Since there is a trend toward less dental restoration, an identification system that works well with minimum dental restorations may become increasingly useful. 2 figures, 2 tables, 2 footnotes, 8 references, and appendix