Virdentopsy is the new service offered by the Personal Identification and Forensic Odontology Laboratory of the University of Turin, Italy. It will be offered also as a pro bono tool for humanitarian forensic odontology.
The dental autopsy of unidentified human skeletal remains involves one or more forensic odontologists who carry out inspection of jaws and teeth and collect all postmortem available dental data. A forensic team from the University of Turin, Italy, is trying to make this procedure digital and remote developing a touch-free digital dental autopsy called virdentopsy (registered name).  It is a coded sequence of postmortem dental data collection collected by any forensic operator (medical examiners, the scientific police officers, dentists), followed by the transmission of the 2D and 3D video-photographic images, photogrammetric recording, and radiographic imaging to the PIFO Personal Identification and Forensic Odontology Laboratory, chaired by professor Emilio Nuzzolese, forensic odontologist.
Human identification autopsies should always encompass dental postmortem collection and a forensic odontology assessment, due to the high forensic significance of the dental data, as one of the primary identifiers, in the human identification process. However, this resource is not always available, either due to the absence of forensic odontologists onsite or due to the lack of financial coverage to support also the cost of this additional consultation. Furthermore, in DVI (Disaster Victim Identification) scenarios with multiple nationalities could benefit from a second opinion of forensic odontologists of the same nationality of victims involved.
Virdentopsy would not eliminate the conventional approach but can enrich the collection of identifying information through the contribution of one or more forensic odontologists. The goal is to achieve best practices in human identification, balance safety, and respect the human rights of the dead when no forensic odontologists are available in the place where the body is stored, or when a second opinion of odontologists of the same nationality of the victims known to be involved in the mass disaster, is appropriate. Further applications include the study of ancient humans, associating forensic odontology with forensic archeology, physical anthropology, and forensic paleopathology.
