In 2010, researchers at the University of New Mexico began compiling CT scans of decedents that passed through the university’s Office of the Medical Investigator. They did this for seven years, ultimately ending up with 85 terabytes of information—including computed tomography scans of over 15,000 deceased individuals and 69 metadata tags related to lifestyle, health and cause of death.
Researchers then used the information to build the New Mexico Decedent Image Database (NMDID), a first of its kind database that went public on Feb. 17, 2020. Not only was the database launch impressive, it had impeccable timing.
With an unprecedented pandemic front and center, colleges, universities and workplaces had very little time to figure out how to pivot operations to handle quarantine. In the case of students, classes became virtual—and elements like demographic information and high-resolution body scans of decedents went from helpful to absolutely vital.
“We made NMDID available to the research public in the third week of February 2020. And then, pretty much everything shut down,” said co-developer Heather Edgar, a professor and forensic anthropologist at the University of New Mexico. “We absolutely didn’t plan for it, but NMDID immediately became an important resource for people teaching anything related to human anatomy. It also became a data source for Master’s and Ph.D. students who had plans to travel to collections, but suddenly couldn’t.”
Since launch, the database has granted access to 573 researchers from 46 countries. These researchers represent a range of academic disciplines, from education to medicine to art. Most commonly, the database has been used for projects on forensic anthropology, computer science and medicine.
Now, after its first 20 months of operation, Edgar and co-developer Shamsi Berry are preparing to publish some of the insights they have learned, including the critical role their database has played in supporting worldwide research throughout a global pandemic.
Though many of the research projects using NMDID data are ongoing, nine peer-reviewed articles have been published to date. One noteworthy study suggests disparities in the life courses of those New Mexicans who identify as Mexican American and those who identify as Hispanic.
“Our first published paper shows that there is a great deal of variation among subgroups of New Mexicans of Spanish-speaking descent in age and causes of death. For example, people who were described as ‘Mexican American’ by their next of kin died 8 years earlier than people who were described as ‘Hispanic,’” said Edgar.
While the results are based on a small sample of New Mexican residents, she says the findings indicate more research is needed, specifically in regards to the way demographic information is collected
“This difference is striking, and indicates that there are patterns of variation we should understand, but they are obscured in vital records by the use of ‘Hispanic-Latino’ as a general term,” she continued.
Moving forward, Edgar said she plans to streamline the NMDID data delivery process, add additional scans to the database—including children—and allow for the addition of decedent images from researchers outside of New Mexico.
In a full-circle moment that couldn’t have been predicted when she started the project in 2010, Edgar said she also hopes to add full-body scans of decedents who passed due to COVID-19.
Photo: The New Mexico Decedent Image Database. Credit: University of New Mexico.