The UK’s first dedicated digital autopsy centre opened in Sheffield yesterday, heralding a potential revolution in the way postmortems are conducted.
Three-dimensional visualisation software and a scanner will take the place of a scalpel at the £3mn facility, attached to the city’s public mortuary, the first of a planned network of 18 in England and Wales.
The non-invasive process is intended to be less harrowing for relatives who have lost a loved one and speedier than a traditional postmortem, allowing the body to be released for burial or cremation sooner.
Tony Simpson, a UK director of iGene, which created the visualisation software, said: “They use virtually the same technique in autopsies now as they used 200 years ago and things have moved on. When (Leonardo) da Vinci risked his life performing dissections 200 years ago, he couldn’t imagine what his work would bring.” Within three-and-a-half minutes of the corpse being placed on the CT scanner, a 3D representation of the body, made up of approximately 3,400 slices of 0.5mm each, is available to the pathologist on a computer screen and saved to a secure file.
Using a virtual scalpel the pathologist can rotate the image and peel away layers of the body, right down to the skeleton as well as look inside the organs.
Professor Peter Vanezis, a Home Office consultant forensic pathologist and chief medical officer for iGene, said: “Where there has to be an autopsy, it gets to places where pathologists can’t get to easily, or if they do, they have to mutilate the body quite badly.”
On a second screen the pathologist can mark any areas of interest in red for subsequent viewers of the case file. On a third screen, where necessary, the scene of death or crime can also be reconstructed digitally in 3D.