Old and new ways of personal and victim identification by dental methods. Review of the literature

Abstract

The aim of this paper was to create a comprehensive literature review on forensic dental methods. This literature review is based on historical and the latest results of the forensic odontology. Thus, this comparative study deals with various methods including certain dental identification methods which are easy to use and do not require advanced technological background. Nowadays, the main reasons for the use of forensic odontology methods are natural disasters, however, their sensitivity depends on the availability of proper dental documentation of the subject/victim. Custom made prostheses offer the most accurate dental identification, which can allow an identification rate of 99.9%. Combination of different methods can also exhibit a high sensitivity (40-99.9%). It seems important that separation of old and novel methods is not recommended. Also, it is important to maintain and upgrade present methods which are capable of identifying one or more subjects/victims in practice. The authors propose several methods which could serve as a base of the new national policy in forensic dental identification and could be used by teams dealing with the identification of disaster victims.