still has to be ascertained. A valuable tool that many death investigators use is radiographs. It is non-invasive, and allows the examiner to have a preliminary place to start. A new innovation in this mode of inquiry is called a Virtual Autopsy or “Virtopsy”. It was developed by Richard Dirnhofer, the former head of the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Bern, Switzerland. He was combing over a case that involved the injuries to the skull of a murder victim. His subsequent developments steered the way
Virtopsy started as a research project in 2000, with the hypothesis that non-invasive imaging might predict autopsy findings and maybe give additional information at the Institutes of Forensic Medicine and of Diagnostic Radiology of the University of Bern, Switzerland. The term virtopsy is derives from the words ‘virtual’ and ‘autopsy’. The former comes from the Latin word ‘virtus’, which means useful, efficient, and good. The word ‘autopsy’ is a combination of the classical Greek terms ‘autos’ (self)
radiographic techniques accompanying legal usage of such images. Since its discovery in 1895, forensic radiography has advanced into other scientific regions, such as x-ray fluorescence spectrometry (XRF), skeletal scintigraphy (nuclear bone scan), virtopsy (virtual autopsy), multidetector computed tomography (MDCT), and neuroimaging, thus attributing to a large number of ante and post-mortem cases. Forensic radiography plays a pivotal role in archeology, paleontology, art forgery, and drug smuggling