Forensic Odor Analysis: Current Application in Postmortem Examinations

Abstract

Postmortem examinations are crucial in understanding the events surrounding death in medico-legal applications. While traditional autopsy procedures and visual examinations represent the routine processing scheme, a novel tool that has emerged in forensic applications is odor analysis. With respect to postmortem examination applications, the use of odor analysis has catapulted into understanding volatile odor signatures indicative of distinctive human decomposition stages. In turn, this quest for the decomposition odor signature has shed light into understanding the chemical characterization of target odor volatiles emitted by a range of sources available in the postmortem window. This review introduces the use of odor evidence in general forensic practices and provides a brief synopsis of the principles of odor and its subsequent laboratory analysis. A short description of the decomposition process is provided, followed by a review of recent trends in analytical studies that have embarked on using volatile odor profiles to enhance various postmortem examination perspectives.