Arguably one of the most common medical procedures, the autopsy has been around since the earliest days of medicine. Determining causes of death is essential to advancing the field of health care, providing future patients with effective treatments in hopes of better health outcomes as a result of medical research.
However, as purported by Scientific American, autopsies have experienced a significant decline over the years, with the rate of procedures falling to 8.5 percent of all deaths in 2007. Because insurance companies do not cover the associated expenses, families must pay the cost in full for the postmortem examination.
With recent innovations in Medical Imaging equipment such as Digital Tomosynthesis, physicians are being provided with more comprehensive views of the human body and its inner workings. When discussing the usefulness of autopsies in medical research, it can be argued that Digital Imaging can prove to be an imperative component of the process in measuring the efficacy of medicine.
Insight into death
Following the 2013 death of a Swiss woman from an aneurysm, forensic scientists from the Institute of Forensic Medicine at the University of Zurich decided to skip the traditional autopsy in favor a combination of CT and MRI scans to create a three-dimensional image of the woman’s brain.
“This enables forensic scientists to plan their autopsies much more efficiently,” said Dominic Wichmann, an internal medicine specialist at the University Hospital in Hamburg’s Eppendorf district, as quoted by ABC News.
Putting the two diagnostic radiology techniques together with a traditional autopsy allowed further insights into the interiors of dead bodies. Physicians were able to uncover fractures and hemorrhages that had gone unnoticed in initial, conventional autopsies. The news source reported that using imaging in postmortem procedures is revolutionary in forensics, akin to the advent of genetic fingerprints and the analysis of DNA from hair.
The largest obstacle blocking the growth of this procedure is the lack of adequate training for the exams. However, with recent developments in imaging technology, the effectiveness of virtual autopsies could begin to expand beyond the experimental and into the practical.
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Ronny Bachrach
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