Thursday, September 1, 2011

Post Mortem CT instead of Autopsy??

Sorry everyone its been so long since i've posted.  I've just been super busy lately with starting an MBA program for physicians. So...expect to see some posts involving medicine and business now...Anyway, this caught my attention since I'm a pathologist and have done plenty of autopsies (thank God I don't do them anymore).  Hope ya'll enjoy!!!!


Several research groups champion the potential for postmortem CT (PMCT) to replace the invasive postmortem (PM), however, many questions still remain. Perhaps the two most important questions are whether PMCT can provide the same level of information as an invasive PM autopsy?  Arguably more important is the question, can it meet the needs of the end users of the PM report.  The authors of a recent study show that PMCT is good at providing accurate causes of death and that the interpretation of cases is not significantly altered by the absence of histology or actualy autopsy. The authors show that in straightforward trauma deaths such as road traffic incidents, there exists the potential for the replacement of the invasive PM by PMCT examination. However, as yet, PMCT cannot provide all of the information that is expected by the criminal justice system in complex forensic cases.


So needless to say post mortem CT may have a role in certain "autopsies" in the future. 

No comments:

Post a Comment