The Disaster And Victim Identification system (DAVID) was developed by Professor John Clement, chair of the Forensic Odontology Unit at the University of Melbourne with Jason Ceddia, an IT lecturer at Monash University and Vicky Winship, Manager of Informatics at the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine. The software is being detailed at the 21st Science Forum hosted by the University of Technology, Sydney: "Death and Resurrection: the science of living, dying and reversing extinction".
The program - which uses a Microsoft Access Database backend with a Visual Basic user interface - was written in 1997, and Clement is now seeking funding from Emergency Management Australia to put the program online, and allow it to run on any operating system.
"At the moment you can't input patient data from Australia and post-mortem data from Bali and compare it," Clement told ZDNet Australia , explaining why he wanted to make the program Web based. "We want to make it accessible from multiple sites simultaneously."
They will know this month if they get the funding, and if successful the program should be finished in six to nine months.
Dr Anthony Hill, an Honorary Forensic Odontologist to Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine and who provided medical expertise to the project, told ZDNet Australia the program was not intended to replace expert dentists at the scene of mass disasters. However, the sheer scale of the problem in these circumstances provides unique challenges to forensic odontologists.
"There's always more ante-mortem [pre-death] records collected than people in the disaster," said Hill, saying that in a particular disaster there may be 230 people reported missing and only 200 people involved, because relatives can signal people as possibly involved if they are unsure.
DAVID works by sorting through information derived from dental records, such as number of teeth, fillings, false teeth, special cosmetic work such as crowns or bridges and so on, and comparing the records to find those that are the best fit. In that way, instead of a forensic dentist having to search through (for example) 160 records to see if any match, the computer eliminates those records that are clearly dissimilar, choosing the five best matches for the dentist to compare. So far it has never had a false negative.
"The decision of a positive identification will be made by a dentist, not a computer," said Hill. He said the program also had a positive application in missing persons cases, where discovered skeletal remains could be compared to large numbers of dental records of missing persons on file, to see if any match. Once again, this greatly reduces the time taken to reconcile the records.
