title: Morphometric comparison of clavicle outlines from 3D bone scans and 2D chest radiographs: a shortlisting tool to assist radiographic identification of human skeletons.
abstract: This paper describes a computerized clavicle identification system primarily designed to resolve the identities of unaccounted-for U.S. soldiers who fought in the Korean War. Elliptical Fourier analysis is used to quantify the clavicle outline shape from skeletons and postero-anterior antemortem chest radiographs to rank individuals in terms of metric distance. Similar to leading fingerprint identification systems, shortlists of the top matching candidates are extracted for subsequent human visual assessment. Two independent tests of the computerized system using 17 field-recovered skeletons and 409 chest radiographs demonstrate that true-positive matches are captured within the top 5% of the sample 75% of the time. These results are outstanding given the eroded state of some field-recovered skeletons and the faintness of the 1950's photofluorographs. These methods enhance the capability to resolve several hundred cold cases for which little circumstantial information exists and current DNA and dental record technologies cannot be applied.
authors: Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, Central Identification Laboratory, 310 Worchester Avenue, Building 45, Hickam Air Force Base, HI, 96853.
authors: Carl N
authors: CN
authors: Stephan
authors: Brett
authors: B
authors: Amidan
authors: Harold
authors: H
authors: Trease
authors: Pierre
authors: P
authors: Guyomarc'h
authors: Trenton
authors: T
authors: Pulsipher
authors: John E
authors: JE
authors: Byrd
mesh_terms: D002968:Clavicle / Q000033:anatomy & histology* / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging*; D018732:Forensic Anthropology / Q000379:methods; D005583:Fourier Analysis; D006801:Humans; D021621:Imaging, Three-Dimensional / Q000379:methods*; D047869:Korean War; D008889:Military Personnel; D010779:Photofluorography; D010781:Photography; D011856:Radiographic Image Enhancement / Q000379:methods*; D013902:Radiography, Thoracic; D014481:United States
keywords: X-ray; computer-assisted; elliptical Fourier analysis; forensic anthropology; forensic science; geometric morphometrics; radiograph; skeletal identification