Identification of victims following a mass fatality is conducted by collecting and analysing a series of scientific identifiers and contextual information of each decedent. Recently, there has been a paradigm shift demanding that this complex identification process be accelerated to meet the needs of the surviving families, politicians and even the media. Postmortem fingerprint identification is a fast and efficient means of victim identification, and through the use of new advances in technology, the digital capture of fingerprints in a disaster victim identification (DVI) setting will play a strong role. This paper provides an overview of current technology and explains how this technology can adapt to current DVI procedures. The Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) incident is a recent example of a DVI event that utilized new digital fingerprint capture technology and further demonstrates why such technology is warranted in future mass fatality operations.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.