Postmortem computed tomography for detecting causes of sudden death in infants and children: retrospective review of cases

Abstract

The causes of sudden death in infants and children were detected at a high rate when we comprehensively investigated the PMCT and other examination findings.

The effectiveness of postmortem multidetector computed tomography in the detection of fatal findings related to cause of non-traumatic death in the emergency department

“…Postmortem imaging for detecting cause of death has been introduced into forensic examination, however only a few clinical studies have been reported on using postmortem MDCT in ED [26,27,29]. To the best of our Fig.…”

“…Postmortem imaging may contribute important new information and may even, in some cases, be an acceptable substitute for a traditional autopsy [3-5, 8, 11, 15, 17-19]. Although several reports of postmortem imaging for clinical application have been published [14,[21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29], to the best of our knowledge, there have been few studies of the usefulness of postmortem MDCT on nontraumatic death in the emergency setting [26,27,29]. The aim of this study was to investigate the diagnostic performance and the limitations of postmortem MDCT in the detection of fatal findings related to causes of nontraumatic sudden or rapid death in ED, and with the aim of comparing the findings on postmortem MDCT with those of traditional autopsy.…”

Can cross sectional imaging contribute to the investigation of unexplained child deaths? A literature review

“…Given the origin of the study, this can be equated as equivalent to within two hours of confirmation of death. 18 A possible cause of the historical notion of "cot death" was that of airway occlusion whilst sleeping. A factor that has dramatically reduced the incidence of sudden infant death syndrome in the UK is a recommendation to ensure babies sleep on their backs, an intervention that stretches back to the mid 1990s.…”

The future of pediatric and perinatal postmortem imaging

“…However there has been little focus on post-mortem imaging specifically for paediatric populations, and only one study (31) has focused on PMCT for detecting causes of sudden death in infants and children (15 patients, and an autopsy was conducted on 2).…”