Forensics

Technology revolutionizes the field of forensics

As is often the case, the military is on the cutting edge of medical progress. The New York Times reported that since 2004, the body of every service person killed in Iraq or Afghanistan has been scanned as well as autopsied. A huge database has been created, and doctors have learned a lot from comparing the results of the two procedures.

A lot of forensic pathologists are concerned that scans aren’t accurate enough to meet the needs of law enforcement and the courts. We’ve all seen skull fractures and relatively small but very important accumulations of blood around the brain that premortem scans missed. We’ve all seen cases where larger collections of “blood” reported on scans weren’t blood or weren’t there at all.

But techniques will continue to improve, and I’m confident that postmortem radiology will play an increasingly important role in forensic medicine. Already, the California Legislature has decided that coroners may use electronic image systems to fulfill the requirements of an autopsy required by law.