MRI-based knee image for personal identification

While external body parts such as the face, fingerprints, or retina are often used for biometric identification, it can also be reasonably assumed that internal organs imaged with biomedical imaging devices can also allow biometric identification. Here we studied the use of MRI images for the purpose of biometric identification, and show that the accuracy of person identification using knee MRIs is significantly higher than random. Knee MRI images of 2,686 different patients were used in the experiment, and analysed using the wndchrm image classification scheme. Experimental results show that the rank-10 identification accuracy using the MRI knee images is similar to 93% for a dataset of 100 individuals, and similar to 45% for the entire dataset of 2,686 persons. Since MRI is used for the purpose of imaging internal parts of the body, this approach of biometric identification can potentially offer high resistance to deception.