1Associate Professor, Department of Forensic Medicine & Toxicology, Pacific Institute of Medical Sciences, Udaipur, Rajasthan, India
2Associate Professor, Department of Forensic Medicine & Toxicology, K S Hegde Medical Academy, Nitte University, Mangalore, Karnataka
3Professor & Head, Department of Forensic Medicine & Toxicology, K S Hegde Medical Academy, Nitte University, Mangalore, Karnataka
*Corresponding author Dr Pratik Vijay Tarvadi, Associate Professor, Department of Forensic Medicine and Toxicology, Pacific Institute of Medical Sciences, Udaipur
Online published on 17 August, 2016.
There has been a significant increase in all forms of crimes, especially sexual related crimes. Bite marks as an evidence, plays a vital role in today's world with the increasing sexual crimes. These bite marks can be collected by various methods, like overlaying, hand tracing etc of which direct cast method is one among them. Studies done worldwide for analyzing bitemarks, have commonly used overlaying technique and studies using direct cast and analyzing by metric method have been sparse. In the present study, direct cast method has been used for obtaining bite mark sample from live human volunteers, and bite marks were analysed using metric method. This study is done to evaluate the relevance of using the metric analysis method in bite marks analysis.
Impressions of both, maxillary as well as mandibular arches of 50 consenting volunteers were taken and dentition casts were prepared. The bite mark impression and the dentine measurements were compared using microsoft Excel Software, by comparing each parameter of the bite mark to the similar parameter of the dentition of the volunteer.
The findings resulted in 14 true positives and 36 false positives, which showed a significant error of 72%.
We conclude that this method for bite mark analysis helps in arriving at an exclusion rather than inclusion type of identification.
Bite marks, Cast method, Metric analysis, sexual crimes
