The effect of following best practice reporting recommendations on legal and community evaluations of forensic examiners reports.

Commentators have recommended that forensic scientists' reports contain various disclosures to facilitate comprehension. However, little research has explored whether following best practice recommendations for disclosure impacts on receivers' impressions of the evidence. We examined whether forensic science reports that are more compliant with these best practice recommendations reduced overvaluing of the evidence and sensitized legal and community decision-makers to evidence quality. Across three experiments, 240 legal practitioners/trainees and 566 community decision-makers were presented with a fingerprint or footwear report that was either compliant or non-compliant with best practice recommendations. Participants were then asked to make evaluations and decisions based on the report. We found mixed effects of report compliance. Report compliance affected community participant's evaluations of the persuasiveness of the evidence but had limited impact on the judgments of legal practitioners/trainees. When presented with compliant reports, we found that community participants regarded unknown reliability evidence as less reliable and less persuasive than high reliability evidence, suggesting disclosures helped reduce overvaluing of the evidence and create sensitivity to differences in evidence quality. These results suggest compliance with reporting recommendations does affect community impressions, while only minimally influencing legal impressions of forensic science evidence. The costs and/or benefits of this outcome require further examination.

On the interpretation of likelihood ratios in forensic science evidence: Presentation formats and the weak evidence effect.

Likelihood ratios are increasingly being adopted to convey expert evaluative opinions to courts. In the absence of appropriate databases, many of these likelihood ratios will include verbal rather than numerical estimates of the support offered by the analysis. However evidence suggests that verbal formulations of uncertainty are a less effective form of communication than equivalent numerical formulations. Moreover, when evidence strength is low a misinterpretation of the valence of the evidence - a "weak evidence effect" - has been found. We report the results of an experiment involving N=404 (student and online) participants who read a brief summary of a burglary trial containing expert testimony. The expert evidence was varied across conditions in terms of evidence strength (low or high) and presentation method (numerical, verbal, table or visual scale). Results suggest that of these presentation methods, numerical expressions produce belief-change and implicit likelihood ratios which were most commensurate with those intended by the expert and most resistant to the weak evidence effect. These findings raise questions about the extent to which low strength verbal evaluative opinions can be effectively communicated to decision makers at trial.

The next generation of burns treatment: intelligent films and matrix, controlled enzymatic debridement, and adult stem cells.

We describe a novel technology based on nanoengineered multifunctional acellular biologic scaffolds combined with wound dressings and films of the same kind. This method allows selective delivery and release of shielded biomaterials and bioactive substances to a desired wound or damaged tissue while stimulating the selective anchoring and adhesion of endogenous circulating repairing cells, such as mesenchymal stem cells, to obtain a faster and more physiologic healing process. We also present a new controlled enzymatic debridement process for more effective burned tissue scarolysis. In light of our preliminary in vitro and in vivo data, we are convinced that these approaches can include the use of other kinds of adult stem cells, such as endometrial regenerative cells, to improve the vascularization of the constructs, with great potential in the entire tissue and organ regeneration field but especially for the treatment of severely burned patients, changing the way these lesions may be treated in the future.

Outstanding survival and regeneration process by the use of intelligent acellular dermal matrices and mesenchymal stem cells in a burn pig model.

A pig model with a deep large burn was used to study the regeneration process induced by mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) and acellular pig dermal matrices, made intelligent by the combination with biodegradable nanofibers loaded with growth factors (granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor and epidermal growth factor) and coated with the anti-CD44 monoclonal antibody (intelligent acellular dermal matrices, IADMs). These IADMs are specially designed to integrate in the wound bed as new biological scaffolds as well as to specifically recruit and attach circulating and/or externally applied MSCs through the anti-CD44 antibody while delivering precise amounts of growth factors. In this way, the reparative process as well as the aesthetic and functional results were enhanced in our burn model. The animal survived, the wound was completely closed, and total regeneration of the skin was obtained without much scarring. Surprisingly, hair follicles and other skin appendages developed despite the severity and deepness of the burn. Even burned muscles and ribs seemed to have undergone a regenerative process by the end of the study. Based on these findings, we have proposed the use of IADMs and autologous, allogeneic or xenogeneic MSCs, as a new paradigm for the future treatment of large burns and probably other dermatological and cosmetic human conditions.