Electronic Laboratory Notebook Assisting Reflectance Spectrometry in Legal Medicine

Reflectance spectrometry is a fast and reliable method for the characterisation of human skin if the spectra are analysed with respect to a physical model describing the optical properties of human skin. For a field study performed at the Institute of Legal Medicine and the Freiburg Materials Research Center of the University of Freiburg an electronic laboratory notebook has been developed, which assists in the recording, management, and analysis of reflectance spectra. The core of the electronic laboratory notebook is a MySQL database. It is filled with primary data via a web interface programmed in Java, which also enables the user to browse the database and access the results of data analysis. These are carried out by Matlab, Tcl/Tk and Python scripts, which retrieve the primary data from the electronic laboratory notebook, perform the analysis, and store the results in the database for further usage.