Japanese dental system by Claudia Sonea

There is no bigger trauma then not having at least the body of the loved ones in order to ensure them a proper funeral, to be able to say the last farewell. Everyone who has ever lost someone in a disaster felt the terrifying sentiment. It's even worst to wait for the police to identify the body due to the fact that it torments you and it seems like it will never end. On Tuesday Japanese scientists made an announcement that would change people's life. They have been working on a project that would actually speed up the identification of victims from their dental records. Eiko Kosuge, a dentist and radiologist at Kanagawa Dental College in Japan who led the study, stated that the computerized device scans images of victims' teeth and aligns them with pictures from unidentified people's dental records, looking for a fit. That would save a lot of time by comparison with the current process of identifying the bodies of people killed in a disaster such as an earthquake, plane crash or attack, one by one by comparing teeth with radiograph images or casts supplied by the victims' dentists. The new invention would automatically compare an image of a victim's teeth with numerous dental records and offer a match in less than four seconds, reducing the workload of forensic experts by 95 percent. In the report researchers mentioned that the device uses a high-precision image-matching technique named Phase-Only Correlation, which aligns images and measures their similarities. The wonder machine has been revealed for the first time at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America held in Chicago by Kosuge. Thanks to their research not only time will be saved, but also human sufferance. Bravo to them!

related story: http://uk.news.yahoo.com/afp/20071127/ttc-us-science-medicine-e0bba4a_1.html

by Claudia Sonea for PocketNews (http://pocketnews.tv)

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