Postmortem diagnosis of fatal hypothermia/hyperthermia by spectrochemical analysis of plasma.

ABSTRACT

Postmortem diagnosis of extreme-weather-related deaths is a challenging forensic task. Here, we present a state-of-the-art study that employed attenuated total reflection (ATR) Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy in combination with Chemometrics for postmortem diagnosis of fatal hypothermia/hyperthermia by biochemical investigation of plasma in rats. The results of principal component analysis (PCA) and spectral analysis revealed that plasma samples from the fatal hypothermia, fatal hyperthermia, and control groups, are substantially different from each other based on the spectral variations associated with the lipid, carbohydrate and nucleic acid components. Two partial least squares-discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) classification models (hypothermia-nonhypothermia and hyperthermia-nonhyperthermia binary models) with a 100% accuracy rate were constructed. Subsequently, internal cross-validation was performed to assess the robustness of these two models, which resulted in 98.1 and 100% accuracy. Ultimately, classification predictions of 42 unknown plasma samples were performed by these two models, and both models achieved 100% accuracy. Additionally, our results demonstrated that hemolysis and postmortem hypothermic/hyperthermic effects did not weaken the prediction ability of these two classification models. In summary, this work demonstrates ATR-FTIR spectroscopy's great potential for postmortem diagnosis of fatal hypothermia/hyperthermia.