By Daniel Lovering
As a ringside boxing physician in the United States, Dr Paul Wallace spends much of his time patching up the bruised, lacerated faces of professional fighters. In Thailand, he's using those and other skills with the deceased victims of Asia's tsunami - to help identify them.
The 50-year-old plastic surgeon, who is medical director for the World Boxing Council, is helping Thailand's leading forensic expert identify dozens of corpses by digitally reconstructing their faces at a makeshift morgue just kilometres from where the towering waves crashed ashore on December 26.
"I deal with facial trauma," said Wallace, best known for halting a 2003 heavyweight championship bout between Lennox Lewis and Vitali Klitschko because of a laceration over Klitschko's left eye - a decision that allowed Lewis to retain the title.
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'What we do is to take a picture of the corpse and then we manipulate it' More than 5 300 people died in Thailand when massive ocean swells, powered by an under-water earthquake, swept southern coastlines.
About 3 100 others remain missing. Many victims were foreigners vacationing at the area's renowned beach resorts.
Hundreds of corpses have been stored in refrigerated containers at two Buddhist temples where they are being examined by international forensic teams and Thailand's top pathologist, Dr Pornthip Rojanasunand. Interpol has opened an extensive disaster victim identification centre in nearby Phuket.
But many of the bodies are badly decomposed, making the identification process difficult. Technicians are using photos, dental records, fingerprints and DNA tests in the effort.
Wallace, from Beverly Hills, California, said his ringside experience treating the cut eyes of boxers, together with the reconstructive and cosmetic surgery he has performed on other
patients, has helped him in analysing the facial features of those killed.
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