Technology a vital tool in identifying remains

It’s almost a cliché: The body was identified through dental records. That has been easier said than done in B.C. until very recently and is still problematic in much of Canada.

Canadian authorities have been far less precise about describing teeth than TV detective shows lead people to believe.

At one point, U.S. authorities suggested they were wary about counting Canadians as possibilities for unidentified human remains south of the border because there was such a big gap in relevant information available about their teeth, said RCMP Cpl. Kelly Risling of the B.C. Police Missing Persons Centre.

“Dental data is a cornerstone of forensic identification,” yet dental codes in Canada recorded just three kinds of teeth: missing, virgin and treated. The treatment was not specified as to the seven surfaces of each tooth, he said.

“I wanted to see our dental coding system brought more into the future, and now dental fillings are identified,” Risling said.

“Instead of just three codes, you’re going to have up to seven codes associated with a tooth,” he said.

Moreover, there is now a B.C. policy that dental information on missing persons must be sent to the provincial dental database and that dental profiles of unidentified remains be searchable.

“So we’re able to match forensically the dental information of missing persons against unidentified bodies. We’re the only province in Canada right now that’s doing that,” Risling said. “The system that was settled on was a system called Plass Data DVI. Plass is a disaster-victim identification software that is utilized by INTERPOL. It was utilized in Thailand following the tsunami in 2005. It proved to be an effective method of cataloguing dental information in order to perform dental comparisons with the goal of ultimately obtaining the identification of various unidentified victims.”

Dr. Tom Routledge, team leader for the British Columbia Forensic Odontology Response Team, or BC-FORT, is manager of the database, created about four years ago.

Outside B.C., there is no national repository of dental information, meaning that if the name of the dentist of a missing person or unidentified remains is not known, there isn’t much that can be done by way of identification.

Dr. David Sweet, a dentistry professor at the University of British Columbia affiliated with INTERPOL and head of the Bureau of Legal Dentistry, has also been enlisted to help identify missing persons.

According to UBC’s website, the bureau is “the first and only laboratory in North America that is dedicated to full-time forensic dentistry research, casework and graduate teaching.”

B.C. dentists are no longer left to guess what police need in terms of dental records.

Police now attend dental offices armed with a letter signed from Sweet asking them to turn over all original dental information to the officer in front of them. That data is couriered to BC-FORT and entered into the Provincial Dental Data Base for comparison against available dental profiles of unidentified bodies throughout B.C., Risling said. No dental information is entered on the Canadian Police Information Centre or the U.S. National Crime Information Centtre without the data having been reviewed and transcribed by BC-FORT, he said.

Dental records are just one improvement B.C. has made in recent years to speed identification of human remains.

The coroners service requires very particular types of information to make a targeted comparison. Risling developed an intake process that is now RCMP policy and is followed — but not mandated — by the majority of municipal police forces.

The intake policy states that every person missing for more than 90 days must have intake information submitted to the B.C. Police Missing Persons Centre. That includes a Missing Persons Query form — an MPQ — that contains date of birth, next of kin and considerable physical information, including surgeries, scars, tattoos, dental work and surgical implants that could be identified via manufacturers’ serial numbers.

Prior to the policy’s implementation, it was suggested that within 90 days, police get family DNA, ideally taken from a parent, and dental information. Now these efforts are a must-do, and Risling stressed that DNA collected for identification purposes will not be used in criminal cases. Families of missing persons sometimes don’t realize the significance of providing this information, he said.

“They’re often reluctant and sometimes they downright refuse when it comes to providing such things as DNA.” Without such information, authorities must keep open files that could have been eliminated via DNA matches.

“And that is a huge draw on our resources,” Risling said.

Also mandatory are the GPS co-ordinates of where the missing person was last seen.

The MPQ for Kenneth Boseley was submitted this year.

Using the physical profile of the body and the geographical co-ordinates of View Street, the Identification and Disaster Response Unit of the B.C. Coroners Service was able to draw a correlation between a missing person’s last-known location and the location of this deceased individual, who was then identified, Risling said.

Fingerprints ultimately led to the identification, with considerable credit going to Det. Const. Chantal Ziegler, the Victoria police investigator working with the team.

After the correlation was drawn between the remains and the missing person, it was a matter of hunting down Boseley’s fingerprints that had been on file with local authorities.

One change Risling is still working on: Seeing whether a specialist can modify photos of an unidentified dead person sufficiently to warrant release to the public in the interest of identification.

Monday 24 August 2015

http://www.timescolonist.com/technology-a-vital-tool-in-identifying-remains-1.2038488

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Behind the High Tech Forensics of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17

Dutch officials expect precise accuracy from DNA-matching software that will be used to identify many of the 298 Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 victims. But it is unknown whether there will be enough genetic evidence from the remains and relatives of the missing to ID everyone.

As of Friday, 171 people who died after the July 17 crash had not been recovered.

Shortly after the disaster, the Netherlands Forensic Institute, a nonprofit, government-owned agency, was tasked with the DNA-matching portion of an ID effort led by international experts from the Dutch National Forensic Investigations Team.

“The NFI received DNA samples that were taken from over 600 bodies and body parts,” institute spokeswoman Suzan Demirhan told Nextgov on Tuesday. “We were asked to make a DNA profile of each sample.”

In order to link remains to a last name, automated technology called “Bonaparte,” as in Napoleon, will be used. In 1811, French emperor Bonaparte established a Dutch registry of births, deaths and marriages that required a last name from everyone.

Bonaparte will compare the DNA profiles from body parts against each other, and against DNA samples provided by relatives of the missing, officials said.

The institute’s automaton has a good track record. Bonaparte helped name the 103 passengers killed by a 2001 Afriqiyah Airways crash over Tripoli — in less than three weeks.

When several children in a family are missing, it is possible to identify them by extracting cell material from personal objects, according to a July institute report on identifying victims of large-scale disasters. As many as 80 children were killed when MH17 was downed by an allegedly Russian-made missile.

“The software recognizes patterns of similarity in the DNA profiles,” the July report states. “When the DNA profile of a body (or body part) fits the DNA profiles in a family tree, Bonaparte subsequently calculates the scientific evidentiary value of that resemblance.”

Genetic matches are not always the basis for identification. Often, fingerprints or dental records provide enough forensic evidence to determine someone’s name.

Institute officials said they do not have data on how many of the 127 identifications were derived from DNA matches.

Genetic samples can be taken from the muscle or bone tissue of a victim, as well as a molar or tooth.

But DNA matching is not always perfect, according to experts. A landmark 2009 National Research Council study on the strength of U.S. forensic science found that while “DNA analysis is considered the most reliable forensic tool available today, laboratories nonetheless can make errors,” such as mislabeling samples, losing samples or misinterpreting the data.

Wednesday 20 August 2014

http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2014/08/behind-high-tech-forensics-malaysian-airlines-flight-mh17/91853/

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Microsoft, Israeli researchers develop disaster prediction software

Researchers have created software that predicts when and where disease outbreaks might occur based on two decades of New York Times articles and other online data. The research comes from Microsoft and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology.

The system could someday help aid organizations and others be more proactive in tackling disease outbreaks or other problems, says Eric Horvitz, distinguished scientist and codirector at Microsoft Research. “I truly view this as a foreshadowing of what’s to come,” he says. “Eventually this kind of work will start to have an influence on how things go for people.” Horvitz did the research in collaboration with Kira Radinsky, a PhD researcher at the Technion-Israel Institute.

The system provides striking results when tested on historical data. For example, reports of droughts in Angola in 2006 triggered a warning about possible cholera outbreaks in the country, because previous events had taught the system that cholera outbreaks were more likely in years following droughts. A second warning about cholera in Angola was triggered by news reports of large storms in Africa in early 2007; less than a week later, reports appeared that cholera had become established. In similar tests involving forecasts of disease, violence, and a significant numbers of deaths, the system’s warnings were correct between 70 to 90 percent of the time.

Horvitz says the performance is good enough to suggest that a more refined version could be used in real settings, to assist experts at, for example, government aid agencies involved in planning humanitarian response and readiness. “We’ve done some reaching out and plan to do some follow-up work with such people,” says Horvitz.

The system was built using 22 years of New York Times archives, from 1986 to 2007, but it also draws on data from the Web to learn about what leads up to major news events.

“One source we found useful was DBpedia, which is a structured form of the information inside Wikipedia constructed using crowdsourcing,” says Radinsky. “We can understand, or see, the location of the places in the news articles, how much money people earn there, and even information about politics.” Other sources included WordNet, which helps software understand the meaning of words, and OpenCyc, a database of common knowledge.

All this information provides valuable context that’s not available in news article, and which is necessary to figure out general rules for what events precede others. For example, the system could infer connections between events in Rwandan and Angolan cities based on the fact that they are both in Africa, have similar GDPs, and other factors. That approach led the software to conclude that, in predicting cholera outbreaks, it should consider a country or city’s location, proportion of land covered by water, population density, GDP, and whether there had been a drought the year before.

Horvitz and Radinsky are not the first to consider using online news and other data to forecast future events, but they say they make use of more data sources—over 90 in total—which allows their system to be more general-purpose.

There’s already a small market for predictive tools. For example, a startup called Recorded Future makes predictions about future events harvested from forward-looking statements online and other sources, and it includes government intelligence agencies among its customers (see “See the Future With a Search”). Christopher Ahlberg, the company’s CEO and cofounder, says that the new research is “good work” that shows how predictions can be made using hard data, but also notes that turning the prototype system into a product would require further development.

Microsoft doesn’t have plans to commercialize Horvitz and Radinsky’s research as yet, but the project will continue, says Horvitz, who wants to mine more newspaper archives as well as digitized books.

Many things about the world have changed in recent decades, but human nature and many aspects of the environment have stayed the same, Horvitz says, so software may be able to learn patterns from even very old data that can suggest what’s ahead. “I’m personally interested in getting data further back in time,” he says.

Tuesday 5 February 2013

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/510191/software-predicts-tomorrows-news-by-analyzing-todays-and-yesterdays/

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New technology set to 'revolutionize' the identification of disaster victims

 New online tooth atlas will enable experts to assess people's teeth Forensics across the world will be better equipped to identify the age of people who die in natural disasters.

Scientists at Queen Mary, University of London have developed an online interactive tool which will enable experts to assess people's teeth and accurately estimate their age.

The London Tooth Atlas is a culmination of years of research from Dr Helen Liversidge and her team at Queen Mary dedicated to dental development. Dr Liversidge said: "This interactive tool builds on the creation of our London Tooth Atlas hard copy version which was used in a number of disasters such as the New Zealand earthquake (2011). "We expect the new software will revolutionise the way forensics determine the age of victims."

Thursday 14 June 2012

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-06/qmuo-nts061212.php

The London Tooth Atlas was underpinned by the need to estimate the ages of victims of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami using dental data. It enables experts and students to see how teeth change between the ages of 30 weeks in utero to about 23 years.

Dr Sakher AlQahtani who works with Dr Liversidge at Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry (part of Queen Mary), developed the London Tooth Atlas for his post-graduate research project. "The interactive version enables people to better understand and see the differences in tooth development up to the age of 23," he said. "It will be extremely useful for educating dental students, and assisting forensic odontology, disaster victim identification teams and archaeology, as well as in estimating the age of asylum seeking minors."

The software is available at www.atlas.dentistry.qmul.ac.uk and an app to support this will soon be available for downloading.

Professor of Anatomy and Forensic Anthropology at the University of Dundee, Sue Black, said: "When working in a forensic environment, immediate access to information can be vital.

The Tooth Atlas app will prove to be invaluable as a ready source of instant detail for the forensic odontologist, forensic anthropologist and forensic pathologist."

Professor Jules Kieser, Head of the Department of Oral Sciences at the University of Otago, said: "The Atlas has been a superb help to myself and my forensic odontology colleagues. Not only do we now use it routinely, but we used it to identify victims of the Christchurch earthquake.

Importantly, if it were available as an app, it will clearly be more accessible. This is an exciting prospect that I support fully and enthusiastically!"

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Victims in Mexico mass graves could be ID'd with new software from Spain

MIERES, SPAIN -- A new tool developed in Spain may help authorities in Mexico identify hundreds of human skeletal remains suspected of being the victims of organized crime.

The European Centre of Soft Computing, based in Mieres, plans to send its new software Skull2Face later this year to several states in northern Mexico and other countries.

"We have been in talks with officials of Chihuahua state about the possibility of using this software to help them identify the skeletal remains of men and women," said Sergio Damas, one of the principal researchers of the software developed by the center and the University of Granada. "Officials from other states in Mexico also are interested in acquiring five to 10 sets of the software system."

The price for the software has not been determined.

Earlier in March, 25 experts from around the world met in Mieres to learn more about Skull2Face software, which its creators say will revolutionize forensic investigations.

Inmaculada Aleman, a forensic anthropologist who also worked on the project, said the software can be used by police, anthropologists and forensic experts to compare a skull with a person's photograph. A match will aid investigators in making a positive identification, which is often the first step in determining whether someone died violently by accident or suicide, or was the victim of a murder.

Chihuahua officials recently announced that they had 51 sets of remains of females sitting in the Juárez morgue, some dating to the mid-1990s, that have not been identified. In a few cases during the past 15 years, only human skulls were discovered in various parts of the city and its vicinity.

The drug cartel wars and related violence across Mexico have also produced mass graves of men and women, including immigrants from Central America who traveled through Mexico before they disappeared.

The software takes cranio facial superimposition, a century-old forensic identification technique, to a new level by making it less costly and less time-consuming to identify someone from skeletal remains. Such an analysis that used to take hours or longer can now be done in two to four minutes.

"We were inundated with calls from interested parties soon after we received the patent for the software," said Damas, who has a Ph.D. in computer science.

The process involves applying an overlay of a person's photograph over a three-dimensional graphic of a human skull. It evaluates many markers used by forensic experts to determine whether there is a match or, in some cases, to exclude an erroneous identification. The program can also be used to produce an approximate image of a person from a skull.

Damas and Aleman said investigators run into problems whenever more than one body is discovered in a mass grave because the bones and DNA of one person can get mixed up with those of others. Decomposition also makes it difficult to identify a person from skeletal remains.

Before using the Skull2Face software, investigators still must conduct the usual preliminary work of assigning characteristics such as age, gender and height. That enables the software operators to make modifications, for example, when the only photograph available is from an ID card or is very dated.

In Spain, advocacy organizations and some officials are interested in seeing whether the software can be used to identify hundreds of Spaniards who were killed during the Spanish civil war and buried in mass graves. The renowned poet Federico García Lorca is among those who might have been tossed into a clandestine grave with others.

Cranial facial superimposition techniques have also been used in the past, using artist renderings and photographs, to attempt to identify Italian poet and philosopher Dante Alighieri and victims of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, according to an article in ICM Inc., by Damas, Aleman and four other experts titled, "Forensic identification by computer-aided cranial facial superimposition: A survey."

Damas and Aleman, who demonstrated how the process works, said another feature of the software enables investigators in one place to consult and compare notes with experts in other places.

The software will be made available to all outlets by the end of summer.

03/21/2012

http://www.elpasotimes.com/news/ci_20218372/new-software-may-help-id-victims

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