Dental identification system based on unwrapped CT images

Dental comparison of postmortem (PM) and ante-mortem (AM) radiographs provides one of the best avenues for the forensic identification of human remains. Nevertheless conventional dental comparison is labor-intensive, subjective, and has several inherent drawbacks. This paper presents a semi-automated image analysis system designed to assist the forensic dentist with the task of identifying human remains. This system overcomes the drawbacks of conventional dental comparison because it is based on the comparison of radiograph-like images reconstructed from PM computed tomography (CT) data with AM digitized conventional radiographs. The efficacy of the system is demonstrated using 4 dental CT data sets and 32 digitized bitewing radiographs obtained from routine clinical practice.