The potential of facial nevi in personal identification

Abstract

Forensic anthropologists dealing with personal identification (PI) of human remains have recently stressed the need to explore the potential of "secondary identifiers" for identifying victims who died in particular events for whom images often represent the main antemortem data available. Being the face the part most exposed in images, characteristics as pigmented skin lesions (PSLs), can be crucial if combined with other input. Since no data is available on frequencies and distribution of facial PSLs in the general population, this study aims at systematically collecting such data to verify their potential in PI and to open a debate on the aid that "secondary identifiers", regardless of their specific nature, can give to the identification of the deceased in specific forensic contexts. A retrospective analysis on three-dimensional facial models of 1039 Italian subjects (from 4 to 84 years old) was conducted to examine the incidence of PSLs discriminated according to size and position in well-defined facial areas. From the collected data we developed a probabilistic approach providing the likelihood ratio (LR) for two settings: (1) the relative frequencies of nevi in the various facial areas, providing the deriving compound probability of owning a certain facial PSLs pattern; and (2) codes describing the facial nevi pattern of each individual of our population, thus testing their uniqueness and so their potential in PI. The calculated LRs mostly proved high identifying strength, particularly when provided by the compound probability-based approach. Data on incidence and position of facial nevi, their generated codes, and the probabilistic approach here presented, all constitute a starting point for advancing secondary identifiers. Nonetheless, although this preliminary study proved facial PSLs as valuable and potentially useful for identification, their significance and validity should be interpreted with caution as we are still at the first theoretical step clearly based on ideal conditions, and thus further investigations are due on the limitations of their use in practical identifying settings. Therefore, being this systematic study only a preliminary one in its nature, it is recommended not to use this kind of approach until further studies will test its validity in several practical conditions.