Evaluation of two dental identification computer systems: DAVID and WinID3.

Area of Science:

• Forensic Odontology
• Biometrics
• Computer Science Applications in Forensics

Background:

• Human identification of deceased individuals relies heavily on dental records.
• Computer-assisted identification systems have been developed to aid forensic odontologists.
• Evaluating the efficacy of these systems against traditional methods is crucial.

Purpose of the Study:

• To compare the effectiveness, accuracy, and speed of two dental identification software programs: Disaster And Victim IDentification (DAVID) and WinID3.
• To compare the performance of these programs against the manual matching of postmortem and antemortem dental records.

Main Methods:

• A simulated mass disaster scenario was created using 52 fragmented acrylic dental remains and 77 provisional victim profiles.
• Postmortem and antemortem dental records were entered into the DAVID and WinID3 software.
• Manual comparison of dental characteristics was also performed.
• The first seven potential matches generated by each method were assessed.

Main Results:

• Manual matching yielded significantly more identifications (29) compared to DAVID (11) and WinID3 (6) (P<0.001).
• There was no significant difference in the number of matches between DAVID and WinID3 (P=0.185).
• WinID3 demonstrated faster data entry speeds compared to DAVID.

Conclusions:

• Current dental identification software (DAVID and WinID3) is not as accurate as the manual method for identifying deceased individuals.
• DAVID's superior performance over WinID3 may be due to its inclusion of more dental characteristics, dentition type, and characteristic weighting.
• Further development is needed to improve the accuracy and effectiveness of automated dental identification systems.