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- Title
Use of pacemaker programmers for disaster victim identification.
- Authors
Makinae, Haruka; Numata, Norio; Kitaoka, Hirofumi; Daimon, Masao; Yamamoto, Taira; Amano, Atsushi
- Abstract
Disaster victim identification (DVI) presents a number of physical and legal challenges, involving the degeneration of human remains and legal obstacles to forensic examinations. One non-invasive method for positive identification may be the use of a pacemaker programmer to detect and obtain data from pacemakers recovered from unidentified remains. To test the usefulness of this method, this investigation examined the efficiency and utility of 5 different pacemaker programmers in the positive identification of victims of the March 2011 tsunami in Japan at 8 disaster sites in May 2011. On scanning 148 sets of remains, data were successfully obtained from 1 implant in 1 set of remains, allowing for the rapid positive identification of the individual. Scanning pacemakers with pacemaker programmers can be a non-invasive method of positive identification that meets Japanese legal and institutional requirements, but this method is ineffective without a preceding whole-body X-ray scan.
- Publication
Forensic science, medicine, and pathology, 2013, Vol 9, Issue 4, p551
- ISSN
1556-2891
- Publication type
Journal Article
- DOI
10.1007/s12024-013-9432-8