3 ms·
"Not really; not always; and sometimes not even with causes of death you’d think would show up easily in a good scan. Doctors take far too much confidence in sc
by mapt 11y ago
"Not really; not always; and sometimes not even with causes of death you’d think would show up easily in a good scan. Doctors take far too much confidence in scan results, feeling they see everything with certainty. They don’t. As a Florida coroner told me a few years ago, “We get this all the time. The doctors get our report and call and say, ‘But there can’t be a lacerated aorta. We did a whole set of scans.’"
I would note that postmortem scans, done once the patient is deceased, can be substantially higher fidelity, because there is no concern about radiation exposure in X-ray tomography of arbitrary contrast and number of slices, and after that metal bits can be removed at will for MRI of arbitrary strength, duration, and confinement on a nonmoving subject. Blood tests can be run in standard panels. DNA tests can reveal CoD correlations.
All of this, streamlined, without a surgical autopsy & reporting being performed, seems like a tractable middle ground.
- fragsworth 11y agoWow, that would be an incredible source of data and a boon to the world. Imagine if it were 1) required by all deaths, and 2) freely released to researchers (for research purposes).
- infogulch 11y agoEven better if it included doctors' notes, diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment before death.
- niels_olson 11y agoWe do postmortem scans of all autopsies at our hospital. We still do the actual autopsy too. Lots of stuff is still required such as toxicology specimens (including toxicology of solid organ tissue like liver), There's also a fair amount of artifact in autopsy scans due to lack of blood flow, medical interventions (CPR-induced lung contusions, broken ribs, hemorrhages, etc)