Automated dental aging for child victims of disasters.

In disasters, one of the major challenges is the identification of the dead. This is complicated in cases where young victims and, sometimes, young survivors are involved. Often, there are no dental treatment records that can be usefully employed and, hence, identification has to be relied heavily on ageing.

Estimating age in Maori, Pacific Island, and European children from New Zealand.

The islands of New Zealand are populated by persons of European, Maori, and Pacific Island extraction. The purpose of this research is to quantify the levels of dental maturation of each of these three populations, in order to obtain data that will be useful in forensic identification and age estimation. The sample consisted of 1383 orthopantomographs (660 males, 723 females) of 477 Maori, 762 European, and 144 Pacific Island children between the ages of 3 and 14 years.