Laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry imaging: A personal identification based on a gunshot residue analysis on latent fingerprints
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Updated: Feb 7, 2026

Imaging Metals in Brain Tissue by Laser Ablation - Inductively Coupled Plasma - Mass Spectrometry LA-ICP-MS
Published on: January 22, 2017
Tomáš Pluháček1, Martin Švidrnoch2, Vítězslav Maier3
1Regional Centre of Advanced Technologies and Materials, Department of Analytical Chemistry, Faculty of Science, Palacky University in Olomouc, 17. listopadu 12, Olomouc, CZ-771 46, Czech Republic; Institute of Microbiology of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Vídeňská 1083, CZ-142 20, Prague 4, Czech Republic.
Abstract:
A new laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry imaging (LA-ICP-MSI) method has been developed to visualize latent fingerprint of suspect persons possibly related to a criminal offence committed with a gun. Metallic impurities and metallic gunshot residues (GSRs) adhered on a latent fingerprint can link biometric information and shooting. The identification and spatial distribution of characteristic gunshot-related metals (Cu, Zn, Sb, Ba, Hg, Pb) was studied in detail. Observed limits of detection for the corresponding metals were below 0.3 ng cm-2. The distributions of the selected metals were simply transferred to images of fingerprints that can reveal a person somehow manipulating with a gun while the presence of characteristic and consistent GSR particles provided the evidence of the shooting. LA-ICP-MSI has been proved to be a unique tool in dactyloscopic identification of a suspect person from latent and commonly visualized fingerprints.
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