Raman spectroscopy of fingerprints and chemometric analysis for forensic sex determination in humans

From the late 90 s until recently, some forensic research has been dedicated to the development of analytical techniques to explore the chemical components present in fingerprints, in order to find other information besides authorship. Raman spectroscopy is a technique of nondestructive analysis of a wide variety of forensic evidence, including fingerprints, at the crime scene. In this context, the aim of this work is to explore Raman spectroscopy and the supervised methods, Partial Least Squares and Support Vector Machine for Discriminant Analysis (PLSDA and SVMDA, respectively), as means to determine sex based on fingerprints obtained from male and female donors and submitted to different conditions (dark and light). Considering a period up to seven days from the collection of the fingerprint, the results showed correct discrimination rates ranging from approximately 80–93%.