Fingerprint White Line Counts: An Upcoming Forensic Tool for Sex Determination

Fingerprints are one of the common forensic tools used in personalidentification. However, the associated secondary epidermalcreases of fingerprints, fingerprint white line count (FWLC), hasreceived less attention within the forensic community. This studywas conducted with an aim to determine the potential of FWLC insex inference among adult Nigerians.A cross sectional study was carried out with 150 males and150 females with age range of 18-30 and 18-33 years, respectively.Live scanner (Digita persona, China) was used to capture the plainfingerprint for FWLC. Mann Whitney, Kruskal Wallis and logisticregression analyses were employed for determination of digitvariation (based on side and type), sexual dimorphism and predictionmodels, respectively. Likelihood ratio and posterior probabilitywere used to determine the favour odd for sex inference fromFWLC.A significant higher mean value of FWLC was observed in females(2.24 ± 2.03) compared to males (0.85 ± 1.29). Absence ofwhite line was indicative of male origin in all the digits except forleft index digit (favor odd of 0.72 for females and 0.29 for males).However, FWLC from 5 to 11 were more likely to be of femaleorigin. The best discriminator of sex was the left FWLC with apercentage accuracy of discrimination of 72%. The percentage contributionof the left FWLC in the discrimination of the sexes wasobserved to range from 23.0 to 30.20%.The FWLC was found to be a potential predictor of sex amongadult Nigerians of Hausa ethnic origin.