2009 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

An Introduction to Computed Tomography for Postmortem Examination

Research Project

Project/Area Number	19590668
Research Category	Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
Allocation Type	Single-year Grants
Section	一般
Research Field	Legal medicine
Research Institution	Chiba University
Principal Investigator	HAYAKAWA Mutsumi Chiba University, 大学院・医学研究院, 講師 (20323397)
Co-Investigator(Renkei-kenkyūsha)	IWASE Hirotaro 千葉大学, 大学院・医学研究院, 教授 (30272420) MOTANI Hisako 千葉大学, 大学院・医学研究院, 助教 (10292674) YAMAMOTO Seiji 千葉大学, 医学部付属病院, 講師 (40302567) TAKEICHI Hisako 千葉大学, 大学院・医学研究院, 特任助教 (70436442)
Project Period (FY)	2007 – 2009
Keywords	法医学
Research Abstract	We performed Computed Tomography (CT) imaging of head, thorax, abdomen, and pelvic space to 65 unnatural death cases in postmortem examination when a medico-legal autopsy is not performed. The causes of death were almost completely diagnosed in 16 cases. Some findings which suggest the cause of death were obtained in 15 cases. In the remaining 34 cases the causes of death are still unknown. This suggests that introducing CT images is still a useful method to the cases which autopsy is not performed. However, it also suggests that CT individually cannot be a method for diagnosing the exact cause of death without autopsy.