International Journal of Medical Toxicology & Legal Medicine

Postmortem interval (PMI), is the time period between death of a person and the discovery of the dead body for examination.For a decade, PMI is determined by several traditional methods where Corneal opacity is one of the methods which is least affected by the external environmental factors such as temperature, humidity etc. The purpose of this study is to estimate more accurate time interval after death using different RGB grayscale filters to analyze the corneal opacity. In this study, we included images of the eyes of a total of 38 deceased with natural causes and time of death belonging to age group of 11–80 years were analyzed using Images freeware for the differences in the RGB scoring of grayscale values of the corneal region. The results of this study show significant differences in the values of RGB scoring in the time period of 18–24 hours (p=0.0005 < á=0.05), whereas no significant changes were observed prior to 18 hours (p=0.0618, á=0.05) and slight decline in the significant changes were observed after 24 hours (p=0.0068, á=0.05) of death. The study shows that the RGB method is more applicable to use when the cornea opacity formed is at least 50% in comparison to the beginning stage or once the formation is complete. This study shows that RGB scoring could be a good method to determine PMI, however, it provides more accuracy when used in correlation with other methods.