Virtual Autopsy: The Dead Speak!

LINKOPING, SWEDEN ( Ivanhoe Newswire) --  Giving a voice to the dead without a single slice, it’s so cutting edge, the producers of CSI are using this 3D technology to get ideas for their show.

Every body tells a story.

Secrets from beyond the grave told through a first of its kind tool, a 3D virtual autopsy table.
First the body is scanned in just 3 seconds using a dual energy CT scanner then the corpse becomes a virtual body made up of six gigabytes of information

“We can look at images again. And do the virtual autopsies many, many times,” Anders Persson, M.D., Ph.D., an associate professor and  director at the Center for Medical Image Science and Visualization, in Sweden, told Ivanhoe.

The data then goes to the autopsy table.

"We can navigate inside the body in real time,” Dr. Persson said.

Layer by layer in microscopic detail.

"We can change the opacity we can make the skin completely transparent. We can look for muscles, we can look for air,” Dr.Persson said.

It’s what you can’t see with a traditional autopsy that allows the dead to speak.

“There was no suspicion of crime at all. But we scanned them and we saw fractures that you couldn’t explain. It was murder,” Dr. Persson said.

The technology also offers a whole new way to understand diseases.

“We can look for Alzheimer’s in the brain, multiple sclerosis, it’s really good for heart exams also,” Dr. Persson said.

Giving a voice to the dead and hope to the living. The virtual autopsy table is also being used to educate medical students about human anatomy without the need for cadavers. It’s also helpful for surgical planning. Medical teams can decide on the best surgical strategy for an individual case before making the first cut. MORE

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Click here for Ivanhoe's full-length interview Dr. Anders Persson

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