Citation

Zhao J, Liu C, Bardeesi AS, Wu Y, Ma Y, Hu S, Shi H, Cheng J. J. Forensic Sci. 2017; 62(6): 1638-1642.

Affiliation

Faculty of Forensic Medicine, Zhongshan School of Medicine, Sun Yat-Sen University, Zhongshan 2nd Road 74, Yuexiu District, Guangzhou, 510080, China.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2017, American Society for Testing and Materials, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1111/1556-4029.13455

PMID

28205216

Abstract

The value of diatom test for the diagnosis of drowning remains controversial. The conventional forensic diatom test with low sensitivity is not a useful tool to provide accurate information about diatom in the tissues and organs. To improve the sensitivity of the diatom test, we developed a novel method called the Microwave Digestion-Vacuum Filtration-Automated Scanning Electron Microscopy (MD-VF-Auto SEM) method which resulted in a high recovery of diatoms. In this article, we analyzed 128 water-related death cases. Our results showed that the MD-VF-Auto SEM method could achieve a much higher positive rate (0.97) in drowning cases. Large amounts of diatoms are retained, even concentrated, in the lung tissues during the intense breathing movement in drowning process. This might be useful for the diagnosis of drowning. Our research indicates that the MD-VF-Auto SEM method would be a valuable methodology in the study of diatom test for the forensic community.

© 2017 American Academy of Forensic Sciences.

Language: en

Keywords

diatom test; drowning; forensic pathology; forensic science; positive rate; quantitative analysis