Forensic examination of living persons in 3D models.

Physical injuries caused by interpersonal violence or accidents are usually documented with photographs. In addition to standard injury photography using 2D photographs, the Institute *INSTITUT NAME BLINDED FOR REVIEW* uses a Botspot Botscan ® multi-camera device (Photobox; Aniwaa Ltd, Berlin, Germany) that allows for 3D documentation of a subject. The Photobox contains 70 cameras positioned at different heights looking at a central platform. Within a fraction of a second, all cameras are activated and acquire the necessary images for 3D documentation. In previous studies by Michienzi et al. (2018), the geometric correctness of 3D documented injuries was analyzed. While their work concentrated solely on artificial injuries and their dimensions, the work presented in this study analyzes whether the Photobox allows for accurate medical interpretation of injuries, by forensic pathologists. To perform this analysis, 40 datasets of a variety of real cases were processed to 3D models. The created 3D models were then examined by forensic pathologists on 2D computer screens, and the findings were compared with the original reports. While the aim of this work was to assess whether examinations based on a 3D model allows comparable results to immediate examinations of the subject, the results showed that examinations based on a 3D model are 85% accurate when comparing with physical examinations. This indicates that 3D models allow for reasonably accurate interpretation, and it is possible that accuracy might increase with improved equipment and better trained personnel.

Comparison of superficial wound documentation using 2D forensic photography, 3D photogrammetry, Botscan© and VR with real-life examination.

Evidence acquisition, interpretation and preservation are essential parts of forensic case work that make a standardized documentation process fundamental. The most commonly used method for the documentation and interpretation of superficial wounds is a combination of two modalities: two-dimensional (2D) photography for evidence preservation and real-life examination for wound analysis. As technologies continue to develop, 2D photography is being enhanced with three-dimensional (3D) documentation technology. In our study, we compared the real-life examination of superficial wounds using four different technical documentation and visualization methods.To test the different methods, a mannequin was equipped with several injury stickers, and then the different methods were applied. A total of 42 artificial injury stickers were documented in regard to orientation, form, color, size, wound borders, wound corners and suspected mechanism of injury for the injury mechanism. As the gold standard, superficial wounds were visually examined by two board-certified forensic pathologists directly on the mannequin. These results were compared to an examination using standard 2D forensic photography; 2D photography using the multicamera system Botscan©, which included predefined viewing positions all around the body; and 3D photogrammetric reconstruction based on images visualized both on screen and in a virtual reality (VR) using a head-mounted display (HMD).The results of the gold standard examination showed that the two forensic pathologists had an inter-reader agreement ranging from 69% for the orientation and 11% for the size of the wounds. A substantial portion of the direct visual documentation showed only a partial overlap, especially for the items of size and color, thereby prohibiting the statistical comparison of these two items. A forest plot analysis of the remaining six items showed no significant difference between the methods. We found that among the forensic pathologists, there was high variability regarding the vocabulary used for the description of wound morphology, which complicated the exact comparison of the two documentations of the same wound.There were no significant differences for any of the four methods compared to the gold standard, thereby challenging the role of real-life examination and 2D photography as the most reliable documentation approaches. Further studies with real injuries are necessary to support our evaluation that technical examination methods involving multicamera systems and 3D visualization for whole-body examination might be a valid alternative in future forensic documentation.

Teasing apart retrieval and encoding interference in the processing of anaphors.

Two classes of account have been proposed to explain the memory processes subserving the processing of reflexive-antecedent dependencies. Structure-based accounts assume that the retrieval of the antecedent is guided by syntactic tree-configurational information without considering other kinds of information such as gender marking in the case of English reflexives. By contrast, unconstrained cue-based retrieval assumes that all available information is used for retrieving the antecedent. Similarity-based interference effects from structurally illicit distractors which match a non-structural retrieval cue have been interpreted as evidence favoring the unconstrained cue-based retrieval account since cue-based retrieval interference from structurally illicit distractors is incompatible with the structure-based account. However, it has been argued that the observed effects do not necessarily reflect interference occurring at the moment of retrieval but might equally well be accounted for by interference occurring already at the stage of encoding or maintaining the antecedent in memory, in which case they cannot be taken as evidence against the structure-based account. We present three experiments (self-paced reading and eye-tracking) on German reflexives and Swedish reflexive and pronominal possessives in which we pit the predictions of encoding interference and cue-based retrieval interference against each other. We could not find any indication that encoding interference affects the processing ease of the reflexive-antecedent dependency formation. Thus, there is no evidence that encoding interference might be the explanation for the interference effects observed in previous work. We therefore conclude that invoking encoding interference may not be a plausible way to reconcile interference effects with a structure-based account of reflexive processing.