Lecture 5 and 6 - Forensic Odontology Flashcards
What are 3 things odontologists investigate?
- Identification
- Oro-facial trauma
- Dental issues
What are the 3 principles of identification?
- Unique (Each human being is unique)
- Macroscopic or microscopic (details are required to individualize)
- Monozygotic twins can be distinguished
What are 2 traditional methods of identification?
- Visual (viewing of the deceased by family or friends)
- Property (presence of ID, registered vehicle)
What are 4 scientific methods of identification?
- Fingerprints
- Medical (implants etc)
- Dental
- DNA
What does odontology rely on?
Pattern recognition and matching
What is the overall result of odontolgy dependant on?
- Value of pattern
- Skills of examiner
What does odontology require?
Team approach for quality control and validation
What techniques does odontology use?
All techniques from visual to DNA
How is value of pattern determined?
- Amount of detail
- Rate of occurrence (of features present in a population)
When is visual identification not possible?
- Incineration
- Decomposition
- Facial trauma
- Skeletonization
- Multiple fatalities
Why teeth and dental identification?
- Individual patterns (everyone’s teeth are different)
- Introduced artefacts (dental treatment like fillings)
- Resist destruction
- Dental data
What are 3 dental limitations to identificaiton?
- Lack of searchable database: location of records
- Insufficient detail
- Lack of statistics
Why might there be lack of searchable database? (dental limitations)
- Long time since dentist visit
- Records kept for limited time, destroyed afterwards
- Family may be unaware of which dentist was seen
Why might there be insufficient detail? (dental limitations)
- No dental treatment, lack of distinctive feature
- Limited record keeping by dentists (antemortem)
- Not recovered well teeth (postmortem)
Why might there be lack of statistics? (dental limitations)
- No information (re frequencies of occurrence of features or the relationship of features to each other)
What is the summary of procedure for odontologists in Australia?
- Incident occurs
- Scene attendance (if required)
- Search for antemortem records by police
- Postmortem examination of remains
- Collate and transcribe antemortem records
- Compare postmortem and antemortem information
- Reconcile discrepancies
- Conclusion and report