Combining the Locator System with WinID3--identifying victims from dental remains in a large disaster.

Computer software programs are typically used at disaster sites to help identify victims from dental remains. Using a simulated disaster with 300 simulated victims and 105 simulated dental fragments, previous research compared two computer programs, WinID and CAPMI4, to a non-computer identification system--the Locator System (LS). LS performed best. LS requires dental professionals manually to sort antemortem and postmortem files into dental categories and then compare postmortem and antemortem files in the same category to find matches. We combined LS with the better of the two computer programs, WinID, to create a single method. This method was used by two teams of forensic odontologists to identify victims in the same simulated disaster employed in previous research. One team had 8 members and the other had 5 members. The 5-member team performed better than all previous teams and the 8-member team performed better than the 5-member team. The 8-member team was large enough to assign a different member to each category as a specialist. We make practical recommendations on identifying disaster victims from dental remains.