Usability of CT Images of Frontal Sinus in Forensic Personal Identification

Abstract

Forensic personal identification is a fundamental topic of forensic sciences and technologies to identify lived subjects, recently deceased bodies and human remains often at a crime scene by using several appropriate techniques. Throughout human history, many different methods were used for personal identification. The most commonly used method was relying on one’s memory to identify the distinguishing features and characteristics of other humans, such as their outward appearance or the sound of their voice before the introduction of computer technology (Michael & Michael, 2006). In Ancient Egypt and China, criminals and victims of several medico-legal events was often identified through visual characteristics such as sex, human height, body weight, deformation of the body, tattoos, old scars or caste marks and clothing, etc. In the forensic personal identification, progressions based on science accelerated in 19th century. Italian Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909) had studied on body structures of prison inmates and had claimed that criminals have particular physiognomic attributes or deformities. In 1823, known first documentation of fingerprints were defined in a thesis by Johannes Evangelists Purkinje (1787-1869), a Czech anatomist and physiologist. French Police Officer Alphonse Bertillon (1853-1914) created first anthropometric scientific system based on physical measurements for identifying criminals in 1880. Sir Francis Galton (18221911) was an English inventor, devised a method for classifying fingerprints that proved useful in forensic science and he wrote first book about fingerprints in 1892 (Soysal & Eke, 1999). In November 1895, the detection of electromagnetic radiation in a wavelength range today known as x-rays or Rontgen rays by Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen (1845-1923), a German physicist, marked an era in forensic science as well as in clinical diagnosis. The discovery of ABO blood group system by Karl Landsteiner (1868-1943), an Austrian biologist and physician, in 1901 and rhesus blood system by Landsteiner and Alexander Solomon Wiener (1907-1976), American Scientist, in 1937, and description of Coombs test by British immunologists Robin Coombs (1921-2006), et al., blood samples was used to be a unique profile that could be used for personal identification in legal and criminal areas. At 9:05 am on Monday 10 September 1984, Sir Alec John Jeffreys (1950-....), British geneticist, looked at the X-ray film image of a deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), then he developed techniques for DNA fingerprinting and DNA profiling, which provided a significant contribution for forensic personal identification in all over the world (Soysal & Eke, 1999).