Virtopsy (virtual autopsy) in forensic dentistry: features and perspectives

Abstract

Introduction. Virtopsy or virtual autopsy is a scientific and practical approach, which is based on the use of digital imaging methods for the purpose of identifying and objectifying changes within the structure of the human body, or its separate parts, without invasive interventions, or with the minimization of such interventions to a critically minimal necessary extent. Objective of the research. To analyze the possibilities of the virtopsy method as a modern approach to the objectification of dental status changes based on the digital analysis of data within the practice of forensic dentistry. Materials and methods. Accumulation of data regarding previous results of the virtopsy method application within the forensic dental practice was carried out on the basis of a search for targeted publications in the Google Scholar system (https:// scholar.google.com/) using the following keywords «virtopsy», «forensic», «dentistry», «forensic odontology» and realizing advanced search functions without applying any filters regarding the depth of the search and the design of the studies that were selected for further content analysis. Results and discussions. The implementation of virtopsy in modern forensic dental practice involves the use of a number of methods as sources to obtain digital data about a person: digital medical/dental documentation (data from the patient's digital register, data from the patient's digital dental card, data from the digital periodontal chart), digital photography (data from the digital registration protocol of changes within dental status during treatment and obtained during forensic dental examinations), digital intraoral scans or digital scans of stone casts, digital bite registers, digital scans of bite marks, digital dental radiographs, digital tomograms (cone-beam computed tomography results and magnetic resonance imaging results), data of three-dimensional scanning/photographing of surfaces provided by the photogrammetry method, digital external 3D scans of the face. Despite the advantages of using the virtopsy method in dental practice, there are certain disadvantages that limit its wide implementation, which include following: high cost of the technology, lack of unified standards for working with the technology, limitation of visualization to the minimum technological characteristics of the devices used, impossibility of assessing the characteristics of smell and color, scanning quality dependence on the characteristics of the investigated surfaces, the risk of losing individual data when combining the results of different imaging methods, not all pathological conditions can be verified or differentiated using the virtopsy method, the lack of the necessary amount of evidences and such of high quality regarding the effectiveness of the technology, the problem of differentiating artifacts related to the state of the body and its changes before and after death. Conclusions. The advantages of using the virtopsy method in forensic dental practice are the quick manner of providing such procedure, possibility of working with data within a digital environment, minimization of the need for invasive interventions and the risks associated with them, the perspective of processing and analysis of data/evidences within three-dimensional space, optimization of conditions for data storage, safe transfer and access to such data with the possibility of involvement several specialists at once, reduction of the evidence subjective interpretation effect, facilitating the possibility of checking evidences through remote access.