The Use of Clavicle Boundary Outlines to Identify Skeletal Remains of US Personnel Recovered From Past Conflicts: Results of Initial Tests

摘要

The identification of skeletons cannot always be achieved using DNA and/or dental records. This is especially true of remains thought to belong to US military personnel that were recovered from the Korean War. A solution to this problem may be found by matching ante-mortem and post-mortem radiographs since the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC) holds ante-mortem chest radiographs of 71% of the unaccounted for individuals from this conflict. Initial tests of visual methods revealed that seven skeletons of known identity (representing five true positive and two true negative identification scenarios) could be morphoscopically identified without errors from radiographs of up to 1000 subjects and from "open" ended sequential tests using claviculae and cervical/thoracic vertebrae anatomy. While visual radiographic comparison methods therefore hold promise, their quantification is paramount for efficient database searching. As radiographs for more than 6500 missing personnel exist, weeks would be required for human operators to undertake visual searches for any single individual. This paper, therefore, reports the results of Elliptical Fourier Analysis (EFA) to quantify clavicle shapes and to provide the basis for expedited electronic searches. To accommodate for radiographs that display only partial clavicles, outlines of clavicle shafts were used to generate four closed shapes for each individual (representing the superior and inferior borders of the left and right clavicles). Amplitudes, calculated from EFA of these shapes, served as the basis for post-mortem-ante-mortem image comparisons. Although some complicating factors existed, amplitude values provided a simple numerical coding system that enabled large proportions of the AM chest radiograph library to be quickly and correctly excluded, when searches for a correctly matching AM radiograph are made in reference to a single skeleton.