BBC Future

The virtual autopsy


Warning: this video is not for the faint-hearted. The autopsy has been an invaluable tool for finding the causes of unexplained deaths, but post-mortems have traditionally been a messy affair – weighing the organs to opening up bodies and seeing how a person died can take a lot of time, precision and surgical procedures.

BBC Click’s David Reid looks at pioneering digital post mortem technology that uses 3D modelling to allow people to look at certain parts of a body without cutting into it. Scrolling through a 3D model allows pathologists to visualise things like gas distributions or scattered metal fragments that they wouldn’t normally see in a real body.

