The oral fingerprint: rapid 3D comparison of palatal rugae for forensic identification

The 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. 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 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. 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.