Positive Personal Identification of Human Remains Based on Thoracic VertebralMargin Morphology

Abstract

Radiography has long been used by anthropologists to establish positive personal identification of human remains in forensic cases. These methods have been largely ad hoc and depend upon specific congenital or pathological bone markers. Court rulings, such as Daubert and Mohan have, however, pushed the discipline toward more statistically supportable methods of identification. This study describes the use of normal morphological variation of the thoracic vertebrae to identify human remains. Radiographs from healthy, male individuals, aged 18-55 were examined to identify normally varying features of vertebral morphology. The frequency of occurrence of these features was calculated, tested, and found to be stable in the given sample. The frequencies were compared to establish which sets of traits varied independently of one another. Finally, unknown radiographs were compared to known samples to test the applicability of this method in determining positive identification, with 21 of 24 (87.5%) unknown radiographs positively identified.

Exploring the potential of cranial non-metric traits as a tool for personal identification: the never-ending dilemma

“…In addition, the individuals of this study belong to an Italian population, so the possible influence of ancestry on the distribution of the traits could not be assessed. A suite of features should work better as personal indicators [3,27,35]; however, there is still no consensus on how many features should be considered enough to prove a positive identification [35,45]. This study could not determine a minimum number of traits that would yield a highly probable identification, yet it restates the unspoken rule "the more, the better" [46].…”

“…Establishing the frequency of skeletal features (e.g., trauma, pathologies, variants) is essential before they can be deemed individualizing and used to calculate probabilities of identity [29,34]. Watamaniuk and Rogers [35] applied this approach to the morphology of the thoracic vertebral margin. Compound probabilities derived from the frequencies of variants on the vertebral margin were used to assess the strength of potential matches.…”

“…However, both for variants assessable from CT scan and conventional X-ray, the potential use for personal identification may be more important in forensic practice than reported by the abovementioned frequencies, for two reasons: first, in some cases the group of possible identity suspect, also called Identification Universe [35], is narrowed down starting from the biological information of the missing, so increasing the applicability also of small frequencies; for instance, in cases of mass disasters involving several hundreds of subjects, also the frequencies that could not be considered sufficient to reach a personal identification according to Earth population may be useful to select a limited number of identity suspect, based on the correspondence of anatomical traits. Secondly, frequencies of anatomical variants may be used not necessarily as a method for conclusive identification, but as a mean to select possible suspects within a large group of possible identities.…”

Detection of cancerous lesions in skeletal remains using visual methods and radiographs

“…While the use of radiographs to detect cancerous lesions in skeletal material has received increased attention within the field of paleopathology (Brothwell, 2012;Marques, 2019;Ragsdale et al, 2018;Rothschild & Rothschild, 1995;Villa et al, 2019), radiographic imaging for the purpose of lesion detection has not become a prominent part of the published forensic anthropology literature. The use of radiographs in forensic anthropology has been increasingly employed when available; however, the published literature primarily has centered around using antemortem radiographs for establishing positive identification (Ross et al, 2016;Stephan et al, 2011;Watamaniuk & Rogers, 2010), the use of trabecular bone pattern as a means of identification (Kahana et al, 1998;Kahana & Hiss, 1994), development of methods for estimating measurements from radiographic images (Schroeder et al, 1997) or 3D reconstructions of the skull (Verhoff et al, 2008), methods of age or sex estimation based on radiographs (Aly et al, 2016;Dedouit et al, 2010;Garamendi et al, 2011;Wittschieber et al, 2013), and trauma analysis (Blau, 2017).…”

Development of a Computer‐Assisted Forensic Radiographic Identification Method Using the Lateral Cervical and Lumbar Spine

“…Published literature on identification by anthropologic radiograph comparison indicates that although there is general peer acceptance of the methodology, there is a lack of confidence that identifications made using traditional radiograph comparison will be admissible in court in light of the recent revisions of admissibility standards . In response, researchers have begun to explore avenues to strengthen the statistical support for radiograph comparison in various regions of the skeleton, in disarticulated remains as well as fleshed remains . For example, Stephan et al.…”