Establishing when a person died based on their decomposing body is a subjective problem with dozens of variables, so any two pathologists can arrive at different estimates. Now, researchers are developing an artificial intelligence model in an attempt to bring some objective replicability into the process.

Katherine Weisensee and Hudson Smith at Clemson University in South Carolina are two of the scientists working on geoFOR, a tool that is partly a database of information on previously discovered bodies and partly an AI tool…