title: Use of pacemaker programmers for disaster victim identification.
abstract: Disaster victim identification (DVI) presents a number of physical and legal challenges, involving the degeneration of human remains and legal obstacles to forensic examinations. One non-invasive method for positive identification may be the use of a pacemaker programmer to detect and obtain data from pacemakers recovered from unidentified remains. To test the usefulness of this method, this investigation examined the efficiency and utility of 5 different pacemaker programmers in the positive identification of victims of the March 2011 tsunami in Japan at 8 disaster sites in May 2011. On scanning 148 sets of remains, data were successfully obtained from 1 implant in 1 set of remains, allowing for the rapid positive identification of the individual. Scanning pacemakers with pacemaker programmers can be a non-invasive method of positive identification that meets Japanese legal and institutional requirements, but this method is ineffective without a preceding whole-body X-ray scan.
authors.affiliation: Department of Cardiovascular Surgery, Juntendo University School of Medicine, 2-1-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, 113-8421, Japan, cyp02060@nifty.com.
authors.forename: Haruka
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Makinae
authors.forename: Norio
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Numata
authors.forename: Hirofumi
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Kitaoka
authors.forename: Masao
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Daimon
authors.forename: Taira
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Yamamoto
authors.forename: Atsushi
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Amano
mesh_terms: D003628:Database Management Systems; D064891:Disaster Victims; D004190:Disasters; D004867:Equipment Design; D044707:Forensic Sciences / Q000379:methods*; D006801:Humans; D007564:Japan; D010138:Pacemaker, Artificial; D057192:Tsunamis