Determination of Gender by Palatal Rugae Print

Identification of a person “living or dead” is an important task in forensic medicine and it can be partial or complete. There are several situations where establishment of complete identification is not possible such as in plane crashes, railway accidents, building collapses, burnt or mutilated bodies etc. In such situations partial identification is required where certain major criteria's are taken into consideration such as age, gender, race and stature of a person. Determination of gender of a person forms one of the important criteria of partial identification of a person. Gender determination can be estimated by several methods such as dental data, karyotyping and skeleton remains. Adding to this we have conducted a study on palatal rugae to look for any sexual dimorphism, which have been observed in several studies conducted in past. To determine the gender of a person from palatal rugae print, this study was carried out in SSIMS & RC, Davangere, Karnataka. The maxillary casts of 250 subjects (125 males and 125 females) within age range of 12-25 years were taken into consideration and were analyzed by using SPSS student unpaired 'T' test. Several parameters were taken into consideration among which few had shown statistically significant variation in both sexes. The result of this study indicates that there is gender differentiation in palatal rugae print, so this can be efficiently used for determination of gender of a person.