Bringing back a face and identity from just skeletal remains of murder victims may sound impossible to many people, but not to Hospital UKM (HUKM)’s Forensic Unit.

Izwan Ismail meets up with the hospital’s head of forensic unit Associate Professor Dr Shahrom Abdul Wahid and head of forensic odontology services Dr Noor Azma Sohari to get a closer look on how technology is adopted in this area of crime scene investigation “CSI”.

UKM’s forensic unit is known for its specialty in doing facial reconstruction, and much of its latest investments in technology is moving towards enhancing its capability in this field.Shahrom says facial reconstruction is important in the investigation of crime as it could lead to the recreation of a face of murder victims. “There were many cases where the police came in with just the skeletal remains of the victims such as skulls and bones. The challenge in dealing with cases like these is to determine the identity of the victims both from the gender and race perspectives,” he says, adding that sometimes even the skull is not present but just the collarbone or bloodstains.

Although it looks impossible to come out with the face of a murder victim from just skulls, bones, and blood stains, Shahrom says HUKM’s Forensic Unit has come up with methods to do it. The unit has managed to solve complex murder cases where only burned skulls and bodies of the victims were found.

HUKM Forensic Unit has, since 2002, spent about RM1.5 million to acquire state-of-the-art tools and computers, and these include a laser scanner for advanced facial reconstruction, spectrophotometer, and X-ray machines, etc.

Shahrom says in the collection, preservation, and scientific analysis of evidence, these technology tools would help the pathologists perform better analysis on the evidence, be it blood, tissues, bones, and teeth.

How it’s done. There are basically two types of facial reconstruction methods – two dimensional (2-D) and three-dimensional (3-D)

approximation. Today both methods use computer programs to aid the process.

According to Noor Azma, the 2-D facial reconstruction is drawings based on radiographs, ante-mortem photographs and the skull. “Currently, there are computer software that can quickly produce facial approximation in 2-D which are called FACE and CARES,” she says.

The current programme being used by the Royal Malaysian Police is FACE which can edit and manipulate facial features rather easily.

Explaining the 3-D facial reconstruction, Noor Azma says it could either be solid model sculptures or high-resolution 3-D computer images. “Solid model sculptures are created with modelling clays or plasticine and it has been used as a good tool to ‘jog’ people’s memory in identifying the murder victim,” she says.

Once the sculpted face is done, it is photographed and image will be uploaded into Photoshop software.

Noor Azma says HUKM’s Forensic Unit has also developed a program to select the various hairstyles from various era and decades to suit the finished sculptures. After everything is completed, the face is then given to the police to be published in local newspapers.

The drawback is that it can take up to three weeks to come up with a model, but the result is 89 to 90 per cent accurate.

The high-resolution 3-D computer images, meanwhile, can produce surface representation that is a hollow shell with no surface although they can have the size, shape, texture and colour. The process can be done with laser scanners and 3-D digitisers. In this process, the computer is programmed to manipulate the scanned photographs of the unknown skeletal remains as well as ante-mortem photographs from family album or magazines.

The reconstructed face will them be used for initial identification.

HUKM’s innovations. Besides using the two methods (2-D and 3-D) to do facial reconstructions, HUKM’s Forensic Unit is working on a new hi-tech method known as Mitochondrial DNA (MTDNA) Phylogene three and image morphing technique.

Claimed to be one of its kind in the forensic study, this MTDNA and morphing technique is used in criminal cases when the skull is not available.

Shahrom says this can be done by using the DNA extracted from the bones and remaining tissues. “It is known that the ancestorship of a person can be determined using mitochondrial DNA (maternal lineage) and/or Y chromosome DNA (paternal lineage),” he says.

In this method, the MTDNA of a victim can be mapped and superimposed onto the phylogeny tree to determine its position on it. The face of the unknown person will be reconstructed using the Mendelian morphing technique by combining the nearest average faces for each group of ancestors on the phylogeny tree.

Shahrom claims that this method can give approximated face of about 60 to 70 per cent similar to the expected face.

HUKM is also compiling a database of 3-D local faces and skulls using the laser scanner. “We have scanned a few hundreds of local faces and produced 3-D skull images of those people. This would give us a fast facial reconstruction based of the filed 3-D skulls that we have,” he says.

Although computers and machines can speed up work of the forensic pathologist, the idea is to just come out with the expected facial of the victim. The recognition will be done with the help of the victims’ family, friends, and relatives.

HUKM’s Forensic Unit collaborates closely with Polis DiRaja Malaysia in the formation of a forensic medicine and science centre which will also double up as a virtual call centre to provide services and examines evidence for Federal, State, and local law enforcement agencies.

The unit currently takes about 500 various crime cases a year.