ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Radiol.
Sec. Emergency Radiology
Volume 5 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fradi.2025.1638294
This article is part of the Research TopicThe Rise of Postmortem Imaging in Forensic Radiology and PaleoradiologyView all 4 articles
The Oral Fingerprint: Rapid 3D comparison of palatal rugae for forensic identification
Provisionally accepted
- Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark
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The palatal rugae has been suggested to be just as unique as the human fingerprint. Therefore, endeavors have been made to utilize this uniqueness for identification of disaster victims. With the rise of digital 3D dental data, computational comparisons of palatal rugae have become possible. But a direct comparison of the full palatal scan by Iterative Closest Point (ICP) has shown to be tedious and demands knowledge of superimposition software. Here, we propose (1) an automatic extraction of the palatal rugae ridges from the 3D scans, followed by (2) ICP of the extracted ridges. Pairwise comparisons of palates takes less than a second, and in this study, it was possible to distinguish between palates from the same individual vs palates from different individuals with a ROC-AUC of 0.994. This shows that the extraction of the palatal rugae ridges is a potential efficient addition to the toolbox of a forensic odontologist for disaster victim identification.
Keywords: Palatal rugae, IDENTIFICATION, Automation, biometrics, forensic odontology
Received: 03 Jun 2025; Accepted: 30 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Kofod Petersen, Villesen and Staun Larsen. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Anika Kofod Petersen, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark
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