An analysis of fingerprint ridge density in the Indo-Mauritian population and its application to gender determination

Gender determination is an important aspect of personal identification, which is often required in medicolegal practice. Many experts believe that there are finer and more epidermal ridges on the fingers of women as compared with men. However, it is important to establish numerical cut-off values in terms of ridge counts to facilitate the gender determination within a particular population. The present study was conducted in the Department of Forensic Medicine, SSR Medical College, Mauritius with the objective to describe the ridge density in the Indo-Mauritian population and to devise a numerical model which is capable of identifying the sex of an individual from this population on the basis of the ridge counts obtained from the corresponding finger prints. The study was focused on 200 healthy medical students (100 men and 100 women) within the age range of 20-30 years. Multivariate analysis of variance results shows a significant gender difference in the sense that women tend to have higher ridge density then men in the distal region of all 10 digits (F = 41.83, P ≤ 0.005). The maximum mean ridge density over all fingers in men (12.26∼12) is less than the minimum mean ridge density over all fingers in women (12.71∼13). A linear discriminant function is derived from numerical modelling, which is used to predict (with a high reliability index, 0.92) the sex of the person whose fingerprints are obtained.