Video: See the virtual autopsy

Many people hate the idea of a loved one being dissected – even if it could provide vital clues about how and why they died. But it may not be necessary for much longer. A growing number of countries, including the UK, Australia, US, and Japan, are looking towards virtual autopsies as an alternative to opening the bodies of people who die in suspicious circumstances.

By combining surface scans of the body with CT and MRI scans, it is possible to work out what happened to a person without cutting them open. A small biopsy of tissue is also taken to measure cellular structure and to check for the presence of drugs.

Virtual autopsies have several advantages: as well as overcoming moral objections to autopsy, it also means the pathologist has a permanent 3D record of damage to the body, something which isn’t possible once you begin cutting it open. Description of autopsies will also become less subjective, as the data can be reinterpreted by independent pathologists if need be.

The video above was created by scanning the head of a man who committed suicide by shooting himself through the forehead. It shows how the bullet entered the skull, then travelled through the brain and out the other side. The apparent marks around the mouth are interference lines caused by metal or amalgam fillings in the dead man’s mouth.


Clearer picture

Michael Thali at the University of Bern, Switzerland, who developed the Virtopsy, is now combining his reconstructions of bodies, with 3D reconstructions of crime scenes and objects or weapons that may have caused the injuries or death.

In doing so, he hopes to get a clearer picture of the sequence of events that caused the injuries.

At the American Academy of Forensic Sciences meeting in Denver, Colorado, on Wednesday, Thali demonstrated the effectiveness of his method with a Virtopsy image of a decomposing head.

It showed that the Virtopsy had enabled him to localise the source of trauma within the brain – an improvement on conventional autopsies. If you cut into an extremely decomposed head, he said, “Everything is thrown out”.

See a gallery of virtual autopsies on humans and other animals