Written by Carmelo Amalfi Tuesday, 16 February 2010 14:18
DENTAL patients in WA may soon be asked to provide details about themselves as part of a new forensic project to develop better ways to identify human remains in Australia.
University of WA researchers and the WA Police Service have received a $410,000 Australian Research Council grant to improve existing identification techniques using advanced computer and chemical methods.
The work with international collaborators is expected to produce a scientific toolkit that can be used to identify, quickly and cheaply, victims of terrorism, mass disasters and murders.
Assistant Professor Daniel Franklin says the three-year grant will fund much of the research at the newly relocated UWA Centre for Forensic Science.
Researchers will use new computer technology, called geometric morphometrics, to visualise skeletal material in three-dimensional digital form so they can be analysed more accurately than was possible with traditional linear measurements using callipers.
The new chemical technology provides geochemical profiles of human tissue. Together they can give information about the age, sex, height, diet and ethnic origins of remains.
“Within Australia, especially Western Australia, one of the things we don’t yet have in forensic science is population specific standards to identify human remains,” he says.
“Our aim is to start building those standards using new three-dimensional applications such as geometric morphometrics. This will lead to the development of a toolkit that complements existing techniques used in Australia.”
Geometric morphometrics involves studying variations and change in the size and shape of bones (from either physical remains or medical images) in two or three dimensions.
Professor Franklin says researchers have already shown that the technique can be used to predict the age at death of young adults as accurately as standards based on dentition.
“This means we can determine the age of a child by studying the shape of the jaw that has no teeth in it,” he says.
Chemical analyses of remains also provided isotopic information related to diet and the environment in which individuals lived, he says.
To establish a comparative reference for the chemical analyses, the researchers will apply for ethical approvals to collect dental tissue of people in WA.
This could be achieved by asking patients to donate teeth extracted as part of routine dental therapy and at the same time completing a simple questionnaire asking patients for details about their life history, such as their age, sex, country of birth and where they have lived since.
