Minimally invasive autopsy improves postmortem diagnoses
Medical Xpress | September 25, 2018
Minimally invasive autopsy with CT and MRI performs as well as conventional autopsy in detecting the cause of death and has the advantage of yielding more diagnoses, according to a study published in the journal Radiology.
Conventional autopsies are valuable tools that yield a wealth of information. Autopsies give insights into new diseases and the side effects of drugs while providing data for health statistics and epidemiologic studies and tissue for molecular studies. They are important for teaching pathology in medical school and training medical specialists. Perhaps most importantly, autopsies can answer central questions surrounding the cause of death, said the study's senior author, J. Wolter Oosterhuis, M.D., Ph.D., from the Department of Pathology at Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.