Human identification performed with skull’s sphenoid sinus based on deep learning

Human identification plays a significant role in the investigations of disasters and criminal cases. Human identification could be achieved quickly and efficiently via 3D sphenoid sinus models by customized convolutional neural networks. In this retrospective study, a deep learning neural network was proposed to achieve human identification of 1475 noncontrast thin-slice CT scans. A total of 732 patients were retrieved and studied (82% for model training and 18% for testing). By establishing an individual recognition framework, the anonymous sphenoid sinus model was matched and cross-tested, and the performance of the framework also was evaluated on the test set using the recognition rate, ROC curve and identification speed. Finally, manual matching was performed based on the framework results in the test set. Out of a total of 732 subjects (mean age 46.45 years ± 14.92 (SD); 349 women), 600 subjects were trained, and 132 subjects were tested. The present automatic human identification has achieved Rank 1 and Rank 5 accuracy values of 93.94% and 99.24%, respectively, in the test set. In addition, all the identifications were completed within 55 s, which manifested the inference speed of the test set. We used the comparison results of the MVSS-Net to exclude sphenoid sinus models with low similarity and carried out traditional visual comparisons of the CT anatomical aspects of the sphenoid sinus of 132 individuals with an accuracy of 100%. The customized deep learning framework achieves reliable and fast human identification based on a 3D sphenoid sinus and can assist forensic radiologists in human identification accuracy.