New Process Will Help Identify Mass Disaster Victims Faster

An important, but sad, part of any event where there are mass casualties is identifying the remains so they can be returned to the family for proper burial. In the past, this process has been cumbersome, often taking weeks upon weeks to be completed. In a recent press release, researchers announced that a faster method to identify victims is on its way.

Researchers announced that a new system to identify mass casualty victims has already been developed in Japan and will soon be available within the United States. Researchers anticipate that it will be available to be used in the United States within a year.

Currently, when there is a disaster that claims a massive number of victims, forensic experts must identify each person individually. Typically, all of the possible victims dental records are compared with each victim one by one. This is a huge process and can take weeks, or even months, to complete. Additionally, there is always the potential for a mistake to be made.

Researchers at the Graduate School of Information Sciences at Tohoku University in Japan took steps to address this problem. They developed a novel approach that speeds up the process, improves the accuracy and reduces the error rate.

They developed an automated dental x-ray (radiograph) matching system that has the ability to match dental records extremely quickly, often taking less than four or five seconds to complete the process.

A special image matching technique was developed. This technique aligns images, corrects any distortions, measures how similar images are, and calculates a score regarding its likelihood of being a match.

This data is then sent to a forensic expert for final examination. Instead of needing to review possibly hundreds (or more) x-rays, the computerized system will typically narrow the possible matches down to a handful of subjects that is referred to the forensic expert.

The technology that they developed is named the POC, or the Phase-Only Correlation system. It proved to be incredibly reliable in tests on over 3,600 sets of dental records.