Lip Print Patterns: Application in Personal Identification

Personal identification is becoming increasingly important not only in legal medicine but also in criminal investigation and identification. Human identification is based on scientific principles, mainly involving dental records, fingerprints, estimation of age, measurement of height, post- mortem reports, differentiation by blood groups and DNA comparisons. Just like these methods, lip prints can also be instrumental in identifying a person positively. Cheiloscopy is a forensic investigation technique that deals with the identification based on lip traces. Although a number of studies have been take up on cheiloscopy, very few of them have been performed on Indian subjects. The present study was taken up to fill this lacuna. Thus, the present study is carried out to study various patterns of lip prints in different individuals and to determine level of significance of proportion of cases in various Lip print pattern groups. Also to evaluate permanency of lip prints by comparing the Lip prints from initial pattern after two years.