Three universities are developing an artificial intelligence system that will allow dentists to swiftly identify large numbers of disaster victims through dental records and to collaborate with colleagues at remote locations.
The system is designed to accelerate time-consuming identification processes by easing the burden on dental experts in disaster zones.
“If the task to identity victims takes longer and longer, confusion in society will continue,” said Hideyuki Takano, vice director of Tokushima University Hospital’s Oral Health Management Center, who leads the project. “If the dead are identified quickly, it will help their relatives move on to the next step.”
When a deadly natural disaster occurs, dentists are asked to visit morgues to gather dental data to identify bodies.
They typically take oral and X-ray photographs of deceased victims to create dental charts that show the treatment they had received, such as fillings on teeth.
They then go to police stations to compare the charts with police-collected dental records of missing people to see if they match.
In the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami, dental records were used to identify 7.9 percent of the roughly 16,000 people directly killed by the disaster.
One challenge was securing a sufficient number of dental experts who could work in the affected areas.
Around 2,600 dentists from across Japan were involved in the identification work in the Tohoku region after each prefectural association of doctors and dentists asked for their assistance.
Mobilizing enough dentists is expected to be even more challenging in a catastrophe caused by a killer quake in the Nankai Trough, which stretches in the sea between Shizuoka Prefecture and the southeastern area of the main island of Kyushu.
A powerful quake strikes every 100 to 200 years in the trough, and the next big one is expected to create a towering tsunami that pummels the Pacific coast of the country.
According to government projections, up to 320,000 people would die in such a disaster in the worst-case scenario.
In Tokushima Prefecture, on the main island of Shikoku, 31,000 would be killed, while the death toll would hit 49,000 in neighboring Kochi Prefecture, according to the government.
Around 300, or 69 percent, of Tokushima Prefecture’s 435 dental clinics are located in areas that would likely be swamped by tsunami, likely creating a shortage of dentists to do the identification work. The shortage is also anticipated for Kochi and other prefectures.
To improve the body identification process in such a situation, Takano and other researchers decided to create a system in which dentists at unaffected locations could perform part of the work.
Under the plan, dentists in disaster zones would take only oral photographs of the dead and send the images to two remote support bases–Tohoku University in Sendai, Miyagi Prefecture, and Osaka University.
Through AI technology being created by Osaka University Dental Hospital researcher Yuta Seino, dental charts of patients could be created based only on the oral photographs.
Dental experts at the universities will then try to identify the victims by comparing the newly created dental charts with records on the missing left at local dental clinics that were digitally transmitted from the affected locations.
Project members are hoping to cut the time to create a dental chart from an oral photo to 10 minutes or so per person. Under the existing method, it takes about 50 minutes.
Toshihiko Suzuki, associate professor of medical dentistry at Tohoku University and a member of the project, was involved in identifying numerous victims during the 2011 disaster.
