Preliminary Research: Description of Lip Print Patterns in Children and Their Parents among Deutero-Malay Population in Indonesia

Introduction. Human identification is vital not only in legal medicine but also in criminal inquiries and identification. Cheiloscopy is the study of lip prints which are unique, individual, and heritable that is used for personal identification purposes in forensic odontology. Objective. The aim of this study is to identify the possibility of the child to inherit the lip print patterns from their parents and also to describe the lip print patterns in children and their parents among the Deutero-Malay population. Method. The descriptive research used lip samples of 90 individuals including father, mother, and a child who are biologically related and their age ranges from 12 to 60 years old. The samples chosen are from the Deutero-Malay ethnic in Indonesia at least for the past two generation who obeys all the exclusion criteria of this research. Purposive nonrandom sampling method was used to collect samples by photography technique using a digital camera, and the data obtained were then analysed using Adobe Photoshop CS3 software. Grooves and wrinkles of primary quadrants one, three, six, and seven of lips were studied according to Suzuki and Tsuchihashi’s classification in 1971. Result. In the present study, it is found that Type I′ (30.28%) is the most dominant lip print pattern and Type I (1.39%) is the least dominant among the Deutero-Malay population. Besides, this study has shown that the similarity of lip print pattern between mother and the child (57.89%) is greater compared to the father and the child (42.22%). Conclusion. Based on this, we can conclude that lip print can be inherited and dissimilar for every population of race; likewise, the Deutero-Malay population has the Type I′ as the most dominant lip print pattern.