Development of a quantitatively controlled expirated bloodstain generation system using an anatomically-informed oral model.

Forensic engineering analysis of residential plumbing components can be a daunting task, particularly due to the manner in which they may be handled from the onset of a failure event. Usually, a water loss is discovered by a homeowner or tenant of a building where the source of the leak is easily determined. Remediation of a plumbing loss is likely to begin quickly and often compromises the investigation (i.e., the condition of the failed component changes, connections to the plumbing system are removed, etc.). Under most circumstances, the evidence is handled and collected by people without forensic training, such as the occupant or plumber, making spoliation a significant concern. This paper will discuss the scientific processes and evidence handling techniques utilized by forensic engineers to determine whether a product defect, installation defect, environmental condition, maintenance, or wear and tear were contributory factors to a plumbing loss.

Improving the erosion resistance of plasma-sprayed zirconia thermal barrier coatings by laser glazing

The investigation evaluates the erosion behavior of carbon fiber (CF) reinforced epoxy laminates, protected with an epoxy‐based coating system incorporating synthesized molybdenum disulfide (MoS 2 ) functionalized multiwalled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) hybrid nanoparticles. The nanocomposite coating with 0.5 wt% MoS 2 ‐MWCNTs hybrid demonstrated a superior resistance to severe erosive wear conditions and exhibited clear deviation in erosion response as compared to conventional epoxy/CF composites. The epoxy hybrid nanocomposite coated epoxy/CF laminates displayed a semi‐ductile erosion characteristic, with a maximum erosion rate of 1132 mg/kg, occurring at a 30° impact angle, and the minimum erosion rate of 600 mg/kg occurring at a 90° impact angle. Morphological analysis of the eroded surface by FESEM revealed that micro‐plowing and micro‐cutting mechanisms were predominant at the hybrid nanocomposite coated regions, whereas fiber cutting mechanisms were primarily observed in the epoxy/CF laminates.

As part of an investigation of a case of pet animal abuse, we attempted to identify small mammalian species by morphological analysis and single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) typing of the cytochrome b gene using guard hairs as an analytical material. Guard hair samples from several species were measured for length, width, medulla formation, and cuticle scale pattern under a light microscope or scanning electron microscope. These samples were also analyzed for SNPs in the cytochrome b gene using a multiplex single-base primer extension reaction. Morphological analysis of cuticle scale pattern and medulla formation was able to discriminate ferret hairs from other hair samples that included rabbit, gerbil, degu, and Djungarian hamster. However, this also revealed a similarity of the guard hairs of the ferret (Mustela putorius furo) and Japanese weasel (Mustela itatsi). Although at three sites, the nucleotide color signals of SNPs in the cytochrome b gene could be used to discriminate completely among human, dog, and gerbil, the signals for cat, ferret, and Japanese weasel occurred at the same nucleotide sites. Unfortunately, no signals were obtained from degu, Djungarian hamster, and rabbit hairs. Although the discriminated hair samples were 100% identical to those of the ferret, there was only a 5% difference from Japanese weasel in the partial sequence of the cytochrome b gene. Construction of a database of mammalian hairs would be useful not only in forensic science, but also for investigating smuggling of endangered species in contravention of the Washington Convention.

Barcoding for diatoms in the Yangtze River from the morphological observation and 18S rDNA polymorphic analysis

In this paper, we describe the system components, present the implemented architecture, and show the effect of an interactive learning system in action. We evaluate the system's ability to learning with two datasets, one synthetic and the other from writing samples gathered from human subjects. With both datasets, the respective test and training sets are the same so as to permit the process of interactive learning to be observed as it occurs. At it's core, this learning approach transforms sensory input and actuator output into rank P = 1 spaces, and uses learn a probabilistic mapping between these two “states” to perform the target task. In the future P >1 will be used internally, and we conclude this work with a brief treatment on why we believe this to be a useful trajectory.

Annual Meeting, Winnipeg, Manitoba, 2009

A traditional mug shot is a front and side view of a person from the shoulder up, taken by law enforcement. Forensic science is exploring the benefit of working with 3D data offered by new technologies, and there is an increasing need to work with 3D mug shots. Among the various available techniques, a multi-view photogrammetric approach achieves the highest accuracy in the shortest acquisition time. In this work, a multi-view photogrammetric system for facial reconstruction based on low-cost cameras is developed with the aims of verifying the performance of such cameras for the production of a 3D mug shot with submillimetre accuracy and assessing the improvement of facial matching using a 3D mug shot over traditional 2D mug shots. The tests were carried out in both a virtual and a real-world environment, using either a virtual or a 3D-printed 3D model. The outcome is a point cloud, which describes the face. The quantitative analysis of the errors was realized through the distances between the mesh of the acquired 3D model and the point cloud. A total of 80% of the points with a distance of less than ±1 mm was obtained. Finally, the performance on facial recognition of the 3D mug shot is evaluated against the traditional 2D mug shot using the NeoFace Watching software (NeoFACE) with a score increment of up to 0.42 points, especially in scenarios where the suspect is not captured from a frontal view.

Separation of Touching Grain Kernels in an Image by Ellipse Fitting Algorithm

The anthropological analysis of the nasal morphology of Dayak Kenyah population in Indonesia as a basic data for forensic identification

Nail polish can serve as valuable evidence in forensic investigations as it is often found on the hands and feet of individuals. Nail polish can break off and transfer easily during self-defense actions or forceful contact, such as in cases of kidnapping, sexual assault, or homicide. These residues can provide clues about who was at the scene, as well as where, when, and how the event evolved. However, compared to other types of paints commonly analyzed in forensic laboratories, limited forensic research has been conducted on the chemical composition and discrimination capabilities of popular nail products. The lack of information makes it challenging to interpret nail polish evidence because the forensic scientist cannot accurately evaluate how common or rare the evidence’s features are within the relevant population context. This project expanded the knowledge base on nail polishes from various angles, enabling the forensic community to use nail polish evidence to its full potential. First, the study compiled a collection of over one hundred sources of nail polish chemistry, formulations, and industry regulations, through a comprehensive literature review on cosmetics textbooks, patents, webpages, and scientific articles, with a forensic perspective in mind. The findings of this repository have been organized into detailed documents and supporting figures to provide an overview of the complexity of nail polish chemistry for nitrocellulose-based (NC), UV-curable gels (gel), and dip powder (DP) products. Following an investigation of supporting literature, the project produced a dataset of 164 nail polishes, comprising NC, Gel, and DP polishes from five brands and eleven colors, for examination. When possible, the set included matching brands and colors across all three types of polish. Characterization and classification of these main polish types were performed using physical and chemical properties, as determined by macroscopical and microscopical examination, micro-solubility testing, Attenuated Total Reflectance Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (ATR-FTIR), and Scanning Electron Microscopy with Energy Dispersive X-Ray Spectrometry (SEM-EDS). Visually, DP samples were distinguishable from NC and Gel samples by microscopical examination alone, due to the distinct presence of micro-polymeric beads. The NC and Gel polishes were distinguished from one another using micro-solubility tests, where NC is soluble in acetone and produces a deep blue color reaction in the presence of diphenylamine in sulfuric acid, while Gels do not react to these solvents. The microscopic examination and micro-solubility steps, in conjunction with macroscopical examination (color comparison), discriminated all comparison pairs except 33 of them, all of

The control over the circulation of plants containing narcotic drugs or psychotropic substances (or their precursors) is one of the most critical aspects of the fight against drug crime. The forensic botanical examination uses classical morphological and anatomical analysis methods, which are not always informative enough when identifying species membership of shredded and degraded plant objects; similarly, they do not allow to establish their individual-specific identity. The molecular genetic methods of plant analysis and the comparative databases could serve as valuable tools for law enforcement purposes. In particular, in the production of forensic molecular genetic analysis of narcotic plants presented in powder, it is crucial to determine the taxonomic affiliation of the objects since this information affects the qualification of the crime. As a case the author presents the materials of an additional forensic examination conducted in the Russian Federal Centre of Forensic Science of the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation, the results of which had a significant impact on the qualification of the committed offense.

Atrial fibrillation (AF) recurrence is common after catheter ablation. Pulmonary vein (PV) isolation is the cornerstone of AF ablation, but PV remodeling has been associated with the risk of AF recurrence. We aimed to evaluate whether artificial intelligence-based morphological features of primary and secondary PV branches on computed tomography images are associated with AF recurrence post-ablation. Two artificial intelligence models were trained for the segmentation of computed tomography images, enabling the isolation of PV branches. Patients from Cleveland Clinic (N=135) and Vanderbilt University (N=594) were combined and divided into 2 sets for training and cross-validation (D1, n=218) and internal testing (D2, n=511). An independent validation set (D3, N=80) was obtained from University Hospitals of Cleveland. We extracted 48 fractal-based and 12 shape-based radiomic features from primary and secondary PV branches of patients with AF recurrence (AF+) and without recurrence after catheter ablation of AF (AF-). To predict AFrecurrence, 3 Gradient Boosting classification models based on significant features from primary (Mp), secondary (Ms), and combined (Mc) PV branches were built. Features relating to primary PVs were found to be associated with AF recurrence. The Mp classifier achieved area under the curve values of 0.73, 0.71, and 0.70 across the 3 datasets. AF+ cases exhibited greater surface complexity in their primary PV area, as evidenced by higher fractal dimension values compared with AF- cases. The Ms classifier results revealed a weaker association with AF+, suggesting higher relevance to AF recurrence post-ablation from primary PV branch morphology. This largest multi-institutional study to date revealed associations between artificial intelligence-extracted morphological features of the primary PV branches with AF recurrence in 809 patients from 3 sites. Future work will focus on enhancing the predictive ability of the classifier by integrating clinical, structural, and morphological features, including left atrial appendage and left atrium-related characteristics.

Morphological analysis, which includes analysis of part-of-speech (POS) tagging, stemming, and morpheme segmentation, is one of the key components in natural language processing (NLP), particularly for agglutinative languages. In this article, we investigate the morphological analysis of the Uyghur language, which is the native language of the people in the Xinjiang Uyghur autonomous region of western China. Morphological analysis of Uyghur is challenging primarily because of factors such as (1) ambiguities arising due to the likelihood of association of a multiple number of POS tags with a word stem or a multiple number of functional tags with a word suffix, (2) ambiguous morpheme boundaries, and (3) complex morphopholonogy of the language. Further, the unavailability of a manually annotated training set in the Uyghur language for the purpose of word segmentation makes Uyghur morphological analysis more difficult. In our proposed work, we address these challenges by undertaking a semisupervised approach of learning a Markov model with the help of a manually constructed dictionary of “suffix to tag” mappings in order to predict the most likely tag transitions in the Uyghur morpheme sequence. Due to the linguistic characteristics of Uyghur, we incorporate a prior belief in our model for favoring word segmentations with a lower number of morpheme units. Empirical evaluation of our proposed model shows an accuracy of about 82%. We further improve the effectiveness of the tag transition model with an active learning paradigm. In particular, we manually investigated a subset of words for which the model prediction ambiguity was within the top 20%. Manually incorporating rules to handle these erroneous cases resulted in an overall accuracy of 93.81%.

The pathogenesis of Dupuytren's contracture is characterized by progress in several stages. The disease process includes two structurally distinct fibrotic elements, the so-called nodule and the cord. Several hypotheses have been proposed regarding the cause. Until now, there has been ongoing discussion regarding whether cords or nodules are the primary source of the disease. Tissues from 24 patients with Dupuytren's disease were obtained during hand surgery, providing samples from nodules and cords for cell culture. Tissue from the flexor retinaculum excised from healthy patients during surgical procedures on the hand served as control. By using the explant culture technique, fibroblasts were isolated and grown in standard medium. Besides morphological analysis, XTT proliferation tests were performed at various time periods to measure the metabolic activity of the cultivated fibroblasts. Statistical analysis revealed significant differences of nodule- and cord-derived fibroblasts after 1 hour (p = 0.0150), 8 hours (p < 0.0001), and 16 hours (p < 0.0001). The authors suggest that distinct proliferative properties of Dupuytren-derived fibroblasts are dependent on the cells' origin. Conclusions about the cause or pathogenesis cannot yet be drawn. Further investigation concerning their apparently different fibroproliferative properties is necessary.