Belgium experience in disaster victim identification applied in handling terrorist attack at Brussels Airport 2016.

The Belgian disaster victim identification (DVI) team is involved in many investigations in our country. Indeed, this specialized team of the federal police oversees searching for and investigating criminally buried dead bodies, identification of unknown putrefied corpses, and more. The Belgian DVI team also assists with the identification of victims of mass disasters (natural, accidental, and mass murders).

Body mass prediction from femoral volume and sixteen other femoral variables in the elderly: BMI and adipose tissue effects.

Objectives: The frequently used prediction equations of body mass do not seem appropriate for elderly individuals. Here, we establish the relationship between femoral dimensions and known body mass in elderly individuals in order to develop prediction formulas and identify the factors affecting their accuracy.

Materials And Methods: The body mass linear least-squares regression is based on 17 femoral dimensions, including femoral volume, and 66 individuals.

The accuracy of body mass prediction for elderly specimens: Implications for paleoanthropology and legal medicine.

Different practices in paleoanthropology and legal medicine raise questions concerning the robustness of body mass (BM) prediction. Integrating personal identification from body mass estimation with skeleton is not a classic approach in legal medicine. The originality of our study is the use of an elderly sample in order to push prediction methods to their limits and to discuss about implications in paleoanthropology and legal medicine.

Palatine sutures as age indicator: a controlled study in the elderly.

Vault sutures have proven their low reliability for estimating age at death in individual forensic science cases. We broke down the palatine sutures of 134 skulls (with known sex and age at time of death) into 15 subparts and 5 stages of fusion to obtain a mean coefficient of obliteration (Cp) which was then linked to five age classes. We completed this study with multiple regression equations of total palatine suture scores.