Discriminant Analysis of Volatile Organic Compounds data related to a new location method of entrapped people in collapsed buildings of an earthquake

Analysis of volatile organic compounds released from the decay of surrogate human models simulating victims of collapsed buildings by thermal desorption–comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography–time of flight mass spectrometry

“…Currently, rescue teams locate victims using mainly searching dogs, which exhibit, however, a number of limitations. A number of recent studies suggested that the chemical analysis of air at the disaster site, aimed at the victims' scent, could considerably improve the victims' detection and, thereby, the effectiveness of SAR operations [2,4,6,8,25,[27][28][29][30]39]. Nevertheless, the application of chemical analysis during urban SAR operations, demands the proper recognition of all confounders, which could affect its results.…”

“…The knowledge acquired from cadaveric studies is important for use by forensic entomologists [21,22], by law enforcement police forces for training human remains detection (HRD) dogs [15,19,23], by medical experts for revealing the etiology of death and identifying the postmortem interval (PMI) [6], by forensic experts for the location of clandestine graves [24] and by SAR teams for the location of dead bodies in collapsed buildings after natural and man-made disasters [4,6,8,25]. The ultimate goal towards the last two applications is the development of portable cadaveric detection devices [26,27].…”

Moisture can be the dominant environmental parameter governing cadaver decomposition in soil

“…Considering that gravesoil moisture content can enhance or slow processes in gravesoil despite constant temperature, Casper's Law should not be accepted as reliable. Gas exchange might also affect soil-based methods for estimating postmortem interval (PMI) [see [53]] and locating clandestine graves [4,6,7,54,55]. For example, Carter and Tibbett [56] proposed the succession of fungal fruiting structures as a basis for estimating PMI.…”

Cadaveric volatile organic compounds released by decaying pig carcasses (Sus domesticus L.) in different biotopes

“…Numerous applications would however benefit from a better understanding of the olfactive signature of a human or animal corpse. The cadaveric VOCs find applications in forensic sciences and the etiology of death [22], in training of cadaver dogs [23,25,26], in the development of cadaveric material detection device [21,24,27] or in the determination of the post-mortem interval [22,28]. Forensic entomologists often raise the hypothesis that the cadaveric VOCs regulate the necrophagous insects behaviour.…”