Image-Based RGB Scoring of Corneal Opacity for Estimation of Postmortem Interval Shibu Malavika1, Dwivedi Shivam2,*, Panga Surya Kiran3, Sinha Rajiv Kumar4, Kumath Manish5, Sandra Rajesh6, Wahi M K7 1Postgraduate Student, Department of Forensic Science, Chandigarh University, Mohali, Punjab, India 2Assistant Professor, Department of Forensic Science, Chandigarh University, Mohali, Punjab, India 3Senior Resident, Department of Forensic Medicine and Toxicology, AIIMS, New Delhi, India 4Associate Professor & HOD, Department of Forensic Medicine and Toxicology, NIIMS, Greater Noida, India 5Director Professor, Department of Forensic Medicine and Toxicology, VMMC – Safdarjung Hospital, New Delhi, India 6Postgraduate Student, Department of Forensic Science, Chandigarh University, Mohali, Punjab, India 7Director Professor, Department of Forensic Medicine & Toxicology, LHMC, New Delhi, India *Corresponding Author, Dr. Shivam Dwivedi, Email: shivam.dwivedi204@gmail.com
Online Published on 12 January, 2024. Abstract Postmortem interval (PMI), is the time period between death of a person and the discovery of the dead body for examination.For a decade, PMI is determined by several traditional methods where Corneal opacity is one of the methods which is least affected by the external environmental factors such as temperature, humidity etc. The purpose of this study is to estimate more accurate time interval after death using different RGB grayscale filters to analyze the corneal opacity. In this study, we included images of the eyes of a total of 38 deceased with natural causes and time of death belonging to age group of 11–80 years were analyzed using Images freeware for the differences in the RGB scoring of grayscale values of the corneal region. The results of this study show significant differences in the values of RGB scoring in the time period of 18–24 hours (p=0.0005 < á=0.05), whereas no significant changes were observed prior to 18 hours (p=0.0618, á=0.05) and slight decline in the significant changes were observed after 24 hours (p=0.0068, á=0.05) of death. The study shows that the RGB method is more applicable to use when the cornea opacity formed is at least 50% in comparison to the beginning stage or once the formation is complete. This study shows that RGB scoring could be a good method to determine PMI, however, it provides more accuracy when used in correlation with other methods. Top Keywords Corneal opacity, Forensic medicine, Images freeware, Postmortem interval (PMI). Top |