AUTHOR=Kofod Petersen Anika , Villesen Palle , Staun Larsen Line TITLE=The oral fingerprint: rapid 3D comparison of palatal rugae for forensic identification JOURNAL=Frontiers in Radiology VOLUME=Volume 5 - 2025 YEAR=2025 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/radiology/articles/10.3389/fradi.2025.1638294 DOI=10.3389/fradi.2025.1638294 ISSN=2673-8740 ABSTRACT=IntoductionThe palatal rugae have been suggested to be just as unique as the human fingerprint. Therefore, endeavors have been made to utilize this uniqueness for the 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 a knowledge of superimposition software.MethodsHere, we propose (1) an automatic extraction of the palatal rugae ridges from the 3D scans, followed by (2) ICP of the extracted ridges.ResultsPairwise comparisons of palates take 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 receiver operating characteristic area-under-the-curve of 0.994.DiscussionThis 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.