Fatal intoxications are common in a medico-legal autopsy setting and associated with sparse findings during autopsy. It has been suggested that an increased lung weight may be such fatalities. Previous literature is generally limited to descriptive approach, including only opioid deaths, lacking definition of “heavy” lungs. Our aim was create model identify cases heavy lungs assess the predicti...

Forensic pathologists/Autopsy surgeons and the forensic medicine personnel assisting to conduct an autopsy who come in direct contact with the body fluids, soft tissues of the dead and skeletal remains in different stages of decomposition, are at a continuous risk of acquiring various kinds of infections including blood-borne viral and other bacterial infections. However, limited data are avail...

The decline in autopsy rates in the past four decades in developed countries (to less than 5% in the USA) has paralleled continued discrepancies between clinical and autopsy diagnoses of up to 20–30%. The interconnected causes of low autopsy rates include absence of predictable funding, clinical overconfi dence in diagnostic modalities, reluctance to request and undertake autopsies, decreased e...

W e've all heard about cases in which a patient presumed to have died from acute myocar-dial infarction was discovered at autopsy to have had an aortic dis-section, or a patient who presented with decompensated liver failure from presumed alcoholic cirrho-sis but proved at autopsy to have widely metastatic hepatocellular carcinoma. Indeed, an extensive literature documents the frequency with wh...

BACKGROUND Post mortem imaging is playing an increasingly important role in perinatal autopsy, and correct interpretation of imaging changes is paramount. This is particularly important following intra-uterine fetal death, where there may be fetal maceration. The aim of this study was to investigate whether any changes seen on a whole body fetal post mortem magnetic resonance imaging (PMMR) cor...

CONTEXT Substantial discrepanies exist between clinical diagnoses and findings at autopsy. Autopsy may be used as a tool for quality management to analyze diagnostic discrepanies. OBJECTIVE To determine the rate at which autopsies detect important, clinically missed diagnoses, and the extent to which this rate has changed over time. DATA SOURCES A systematic literature search for English-la...

BACKGROUND Minimally invasive autopsy by post mortem magnetic resonance (MR) imaging has been suggested as an alternative for conventional autopsy in view of the declining consented autopsy rates. However, large prospective studies rigorously evaluating the accuracy of such an approach are lacking. We intend to compare the accuracy of a minimally invasive autopsy approach using post mortem MR i...

PURPOSE The causes of mortality in Hodgkin's disease patients are insufficiently known. Autopsy study is the fundamental procedure in the investigation of these causes. The present study analyzes the autopsies performed in a series of patients diagnosed as having Hodgkin's disease, determining the cause of death in each case and comparing the premortem clinical data and the postmortem findings....

A thorough medical inquiry is included in every aviation mishap investigation. While the gold standard of this investigation is a forensic pathology examination, numerous reports stress the important role of computed tomography in the postmortem evaluation of trauma victims. To characterize the findings identified by postmortem CT and compare its performance to conventional autopsy in victims o...

OBJECTIVE To determine the autopsy acceptance rate and reasons for decline at Mulago Hospital, Kampala, Uganda. METHODS The next of kin of patients who died in a combined infectious diseases and gastro-enterology ward of Mulago Hospital were approached to answer a questionnaire concerning characteristics of their deceased relative. During the interview their consent was asked to perform a com...