VIRTUAL AUTOPSY (Adapted from a Report in THE TELEGRAPH )Normally
post mortem examination of bodies are carried out by dissecting the
bodies and examining it in detail for determining cause of
death,whether it is natural or result of any outside influence like
accident, murder or some other cause.This takes a lot of time ,more so,
if the examination of the body is done after a long period after death
takes place, as in the case of murder or some other causes, when the
body may be traced a few days or weeks later.In contrast, a new
method has been spearheaded by a Swedish Scientist Mr Anders Persson,who
leads the project . His project makes it possible to do the
AUTOPSY in a few minutes as against the
traditional post mortem involving a few
hours.In this new procedure they make use of the ability of the
modern CT Scanner and MRI Imaging techniques to get
images of a
body,in tact or battered, without invading it physically.By giving the
images a 3 Dimensional form would make it easy to be examined from
all angles. As against this the current practice is,the traditional
'' neck to pelvis '' cut which is normally
adopted for autopsys
standardised by the German Doctor,Rudolph Virschow, (considered to be
the father of pathology) 150 years before. Mr Persson who
leads this new project, by putting together a number of technologies
like powerful medical imaging technologies and adoption of new
software for advanced visualisation etc to fine tune and perfect the
method, claims a lot of advantages for the new method over the
traditional one . From the images produced and fed to a powerful
desktop would give you in about 10 minutes images which the
radiologists can make Three Dimensional Pictures. These pictures
gives greater details and allows deeper examination by the
coroners,pathologists and other medical personnel to examine the
condition of the body in order to arrive at the cause and manner of
death . Besides this method enables to keep permanent records of the
studies for reference at any time later , Moreover, some religions
like Islam, Judaism object to allow dissection of dead bodies as
obnoxious to their belief.Thanks to the
efforts of Mr Persson and his 70 colleagues the new method of virtual
autopsy is planned to be adopted at Sweden . In the neighbouring
country in Finland this new method is sparingly used. Moreover,
Pentagon have adopted this to some extent and are using this in Iraq
and Afghanistan areas to assess the cause of death of theiir soldiers killed in the warfare..
Mr Pesson who was in New Delhi as part of Swedish Govt help to
digitise INDIA''s medical records.According to him the new method
suffers a few shortcomngs also The negative side of this method is,
it cannot give a toxicology sample and also would not be able to
visualise blood circulation and bleeding. The procedure involves
higher costs also and in view of these factors it can at best be used
only as a supplement to the traditional method .KONTHAI
e.
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