Human Identification by Comparative Medical Radiography A Validation Study of the Lateral Foot

Abstract

Personal identification is often an essential contribution of forensic anthropologists in medicolegal death investigations.
This research evaluated the accuracy and reliability of radiographic features of the lateral foot when used by professionals and graduate students in forensic anthropology for purposes of identification. A survey comprising five scenarios, each with one antemortem lateral foot radiograph and 20 postmortem lateral foot radiographs, was provided to participants (n = 35) from which they were asked to conclude an identification, an exclusion, or insufficient evidence. Four of the five scenarios included a postmortem match for the antemortem film, and one scenario did not have an associated match for the antemortem among the postmortems. The findings of this study indicate practitioners can reliably use lateral foot radiographs for positive identification or exclusion of tentative identities in comparative medical radiography casework with an overall correct classification rate (CCR) of 94.19% and a positive predictive value of 95.87%. Pairwise Mann–Whitney U tests for evaluator profession and evaluator case experience produced nonsignificant p-values (p ≥ 0.05) for all tests, suggesting identification accuracy is independent of observer profession and case experience.