Abstract
Aims:This study aims to verify the applicability of modern dental technologies and their related principles of use to the forensic sciences in the field of personal identification.Background:Personal identification has always had a major role in many legal and administrative actions regarding both living and death beings. The techniques used are much less advanced than the technologies potentially available.Objective:Modern technologies, available to the daily dental clinic practice, as intraoral scanners, combined in particular to the specialist skill in orthodontics, can help redefine the methods of personal identification according to the levels of accuracy, trueness and feasibility greater than those applied in traditional forensic dentistry.Methods:23 corpses (12F;11M) have been selected for intraoral scanning with the Carestream 3500®digital device. The superimposition of initial and late digital models, digital models and radiographs (orthopantomography and full mouth periapical films) has been evaluated to verify the stability of some structures as palatal rugae after death and to assess intraoral scanning as a successful comparative method between antemortem and post-mortem records (digital models or radiographs). Obtained results were subjected to statistical analysis by the t-student test and X-square test with Yates correction (p<0.05).Results:After death, palatal rugae significatively change especially in mouths with restorations/prosthesis/missing teeth. The percentages of correct matching between scans and radiographs are very higher (up 90%; p<0.05).Conclusion:This study has been set up to study and develop new, reliable and fast methods of personal identification that can surpass many of the issues seen with the other techniques by a modern rugoscopy, a modern radiographic-digital comparison and virtual oral autopsy.
Highlights
This study has been set up to study and develop new, reliable and fast methods of personal identification that can surpass many of the issues seen with the other techniques by a modern rugoscopy, a modern radiographic-digital comparison and virtual oral autopsy
From the past to today, the identification methods of odontologist competence have been enriched with new tools, according to the most recent needs. To those of an exclusively dental nature, which mainly lead to comparative methods between ante-mortem data or between ante-mortem and post-mortem data, highreliability methods such as rugoscopy and oral autopsy on cadaver have been associated
On plaster patterns through the use of a pencil, the number of rugae, their shape (Fig. 2) and their length are highlighted following the reference classifications that over the years have been developed by different authors. Palatal rugae, such as hand fingerprints, are a unique and distinctive trait of the human being and remain unchanged after death [2]. Due to their dimensional stability, they are used as a method of personal identification during the visual inspection of mouth post-mortem comparing their features with plaster models of the dental arches
Summary
On plaster patterns through the use of a pencil, the number of rugae, their shape (Fig. 2) and their length are highlighted following the reference classifications that over the years have been developed by different authors Palatal rugae, such as hand fingerprints, are a unique and distinctive trait of the human being and remain unchanged after death [2]. The use of intraoral scanners has made it possible to obtain models of dental arches often much more accurate than those detected with traditional dental impression materials [4] This should be considered very important from a forensic point of view both for the possibility of having a detailed and reliable reproduction of both dental structures and palatal rugae and for the possibility of having a digital archive shareable even for judicial reasons without the risk of losing a significant antemortem data as in the traditional archives of plaster models. The techniques used are much less advanced than the technologies potentially available
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