Virtual Autopsy

For medical imaging we have to research a medical imaging topic and I opted to change for something more relevant to my these- Virtual Autopsy.

There' s ton's of literature out there and a crowd in Switzerland seem to be owning the show at the moment with their Virtopsy project.

thanks google: Results 1 - 10 of about 7,430 for virtopsy. (0.41 seconds) :)


Another idea is to use Dual Source Dual Energy CT, this is effeectively taking two registered sets of scans at different radiation doses and doing maths on the pixel value to tweak what you can see (I think they do this prior to reconstruction.) It's nice how the lungs stand out with more contrast than the bone.

this image on the right is an exaple of this technology.
Advances of dual source, dual-energy imaging in postmortem CT by
Anders Persson , Christian Jackowski, Elias Engstr, Helene Zachrisson-

darwin award- for not keeping it simple

With all this reading about death and finding out the most important thing about death (whodunnit?) using cool toys like CT scanners and MRI machine I have found some quotes that are a little funny (although not really funny, rather strange and disturbed.)

Read ahead...

Abstract: A body was found behind a car with a noose tied around its neck, the other end of the rope tied to a tree. Apparently the man committed suicide by driving away with the noose tied around his neck and was dragged out of the car through the open hatchback. Postmortem multislice-computed tomography (MSCT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) indicated that the cause of death was cerebral hypoxia due to classic strangulation by hanging, and not due to a brainstem lesion because of a hang-man fracture as would be expected in such a dynamic situation. Furthermore, the MRI displayed intramuscular haemorrhage, bleeding into the clavicular insertions of the sternocleidomastoid muscles and subcutaneous neck tissue. We conclude that MSCT and MRI are useful instruments with an increased value compared with 2D radiographs to augment the external findings of bodies when an autopsy is refused. But further postmortem research and comparing validation is needed.
fail?
thanks to


Author(s): Bolliger S, Thali M, Jackowski C, Aghayev E, Dirnhofer R, Sonnenschein MT
Source: JOURNAL OF FORENSIC SCIENCES Volume: 50 Issue: 2 Pages: 455-460 Published: MAR 2005

for making my day.

And for reference- kinetic is king

cough cough

I'm sitting in the computer lab at the new learning centre at UCT Health Sciences faculty, and I have a cold.... Just got this now and I feel a bit like piglet. Every time a cough there's the odd stare.
On the plus side- I thought I'd take a resting heart rate today. Sinus Tachycardia is a sign of flu (apparently), as well as for other systemic infections. Sooo to the layman, if my HR is high when I'm resting- don't train because you can die.

My resting HR was 56bpm. pretty low. Sweet... now to put tissues in my hydration pack.