Role of virtopsy in the postmortem diagnosis of drowning

Abstract

Drowning is the third leading cause of unintentional injury death worldwide, accounting for 7% of all injury related deaths[1]. The autopsy diagnosis of drowning is one of the major problems in forensic medicine, especially when there is delay in recovering the corpse[2]. The main limit in the diagnosis of drowning is that even if a body is recovered from sea water, it may not have drowned and the proof that death was due to drowning may constitute a difficult problem to solve in forensic medicine. Due to the admitted limits of autopsy-based studies in the diagnosis of drowning, virtopsy is considered the new imaging horizon in these post-mortem studies[3-6]. The aim of our study was to evaluate the role of virtopsy performed through CT in forensic diagnosis of drowning.