How Fort Worth researchers plan to use AI to identify human remains
.jpg "Kate Lesciotto, assistant professor at UNT Health’s College of Biomedical and Translational Sciences, works with a colleague in her lab. Lesciotto is a primary investigator on a new project that will use AI to help identify human remains")
There are more than 11,000 unidentified bodies in the U.S., according to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System.
Soon, identifying those bodies could get a little easier, thanks to new software being developed at UNT Health Fort Worth.
The university is part of a team that was recently awarded a $2 million grant from the National Institute of Justice to develop artificial intelligence-powered software that can be used by forensic anthropologists to make identifying human remains more accurate.
“Our hope is that the program can be used by law enforcement and anthropologists to hopefully reduce that number of unidentified individuals and really help bring closure to families,” said Kate Lesciotto, one of the primary investigators on the project. Lesciotto, who has a Ph.D. in anthropology, is also an assistant professor at UNT Health’s College of Biomedical and Translational Sciences.
Lesciotto explained that forensic anthropologists identify human remains by creating a biological profile of a deceased individual, in which they estimate a person’s age, ancestry, sex, and height. Currently, forensic anthropologists estimate these individually, without considering how they interact with each other.
But Lesciotto’s AI software project will work differently. Forensic anthropologists will input data from the deceased individual — like bone measurements — and the software will use machine learning to help identify new patterns within the data. The end result, Lesciotto said, is that the software will provide an estimate and say, for example, that a given individual is most likely male and between 5 feet 8 inches and 6 feet in height.
Lesciotto will work with research teams from Michigan State University, Washburn University, Texas State University and the University of New Mexico to complete the project. The grant is funded through December 2027.
To create the AI software, Lesciotto and her colleagues will build a reference database from skeletal remains that have been donated. The donated skeletons will allow the researchers to train the software on relationships between different demographic characteristics.
“We’re really taking a new approach,” Lesciotto said. “I think this project really has the potential to push the field of forensic anthropology in a new direction.”
