Advancing the State-of-the-Art for Virtual Autopsies

The importance of autopsy procedures leading to the establishment of the cause of death is well known. In forensic cases the autopsy can provide key information and guide the criminal investigation. A recent addition to the autopsy work flow is the possibility of conducting postmortem imaging, in its 3D version also called Virtual Autopsy (VA), using Computed Tomography (CT) data from scans of cadavers in combination with three-dimensional Direct Volume Rendering (DVR) techniques. The previous research efforts by members of the project group have successfully shown the basic benefits of VA. This project aims to take the next steps: to enhance the existing methods by addressing the remaining research challenges and to prove that the full envisioned potential of VA is attainable. The needed advances encompass both technology and workflow issues in VA procedures. The mission of the proposed project is: To develop VA technologies and methodologies that enable wide spread use of virtual autopsies in the standard forensic workflow. To address the required advancement of Virtual Autopsy technology and procedure the work in this project is organized into the following areas: Data Capture, PACS platform, Virtual Autopsy Workstation, Virtual Autopsy Workflow Studies, and Demonstrator Integration. The objective of the Data Capture area is to develop scanning procedures tailored for VA, for both CT and Dual- Energy CT. The PACS Platform research aims to extend and enhance the existing multiresolution framework in a PACS environment. The VA Workstation area will develop visualization tools to increase quality and efficiency of the VA procedures at both the radiology and forensics departments. There are also non-technical contributions, the VA Workflow Studies area aims to develop collaborative procedures that increase the value of VA and exploit the novel visualization techniques and thus establish documented procedures for VA. Finally, there is an integration project area that puts together the innovations in a demonstrator system for dissemination use. The advances of VA that will result from this project are foreseen to play an important role to improve forensics in terms of enabling faster and more accurate crime solving. Furthermore, many aspects of VA can be directly transferred to improvements for general diagnostic imaging in health care.

• Staff:

Anders Ynnerman , Professor Ph.D		Dean of steering committee		ITN Linköping University
Claes Lundström , Ph.D				CMIV/SECTRA
Patric Ljung , Ph.D				CMIV/Siemens corporate reseach
Johan berge , M.D.				RMV Linköping University
Michael Thali , M.D. Ph.D				IRM University Bern
Anders Persson , M.D. Ph.D		Director CMIV		IMH/CMIV Linköping University

• Former Staff:

• Project Description:

To address the required advancement of Virtual Autopsy technologies and procedures the work in this project is organized into the following areas: Data Capture, PACS Platform, Virtual Autopsy Workstation, Virtual Autopsy Workflow Studies, and Demonstrator Integration. Figure 1 shows a schematic overview of the project areas and their relationships, in the context of the primary data flow. An important aspect is the distributed nature of VA Workstations, in this case present both at the radiology department with the scanner and at the forensics department with remote access to the data.