Influence of a soft tissue layer covering the kidney upon blunt impact.

Blunt abdominal organ injury is an abundant and relevant topic in forensic medicine, yet comparatively few experimental studies have been performed to quantify organ injury threshold parameters. The goal of this study was to relate an impact to a kidney injury determining an energy threshold while taking account of the influence of the overlaying soft tissue thickness. A model consisting of ballistic gelatin with an embedded filled porcine kidney was made such that a gelatin layer of 2 or 4 cm thickness covered the organ.

Threshold of the skull injury for blunt force impacts under free and constraint boundary conditions.

The formation of skull fractures is an important topic in legal medicine. In particular, the influence of boundary conditions is controversially discussed in the literature. A study focusing solely on this aspect was missing.

Impact energy of everyday items used for assault.

Blunt force is a frequently used type of violence especially because it can be performed with basically every object of our daily lives or with bare hands or feet. The injuries and medical consequences have been widely examined, whereas the forces and especially the energies acting on impact have rarely been analyzed. The aim of the present study is to provide the impact energy and its ranges of four longish everyday items with different characteristics for male and female offenders.

Stabbing energy and force required for pocket-knives to pierce ribs.

Purpose: In addition to reconstructing the course of events, the medical examiner will often have to answer questions regarding the force necessary to inflict a certain injury in stabbing incidents. Several groups have examined the force needed to penetrate soft-tissue and clothing; however, no studies addressing the energy needed for penetrating ribs exist. Therefore, we decided to investigate this force on an animal model.

The influence of striking object characteristics on the impact energy.

A common form of violence investigated in legal medicine is blunt trauma caused by striking with different objects. The injuries and medical consequences have been widely examined, whereas the forces and especially the energies acting on impact have rarely been analyzed. This study focuses on how the impact energy of different striking objects depends on their characteristics.

Sex determination from os sacrum by postmortem CT.

Sex determination in forensic practice is performed mostly on sexually dimorphic bones, including pelvic bones such as the os sacrum. Postmortem CT scan provides an easy and fast method for depicting and measuring bone structures prior to elaborate autopsy preparations. To develop a simple and objective method for sex determination in postmortem CT, metric data were evaluated from CT images of the pelvic-associated os sacrum of 95 corpses (49 men and 46 women) from the Canton of Bern, Switzerland.

[Aiming at the chest, but hitting the back].

Gunshot injuries in the back may suggest the unjustified use of firearms. A wound in the back inflicted by a firearm should not automatically imply that the shooter aimed at the back. A previous study demonstrated that it is possible for men to turn their trunk faster than it takes for a shooter to fire or throw a hand-operated weapon.

The influence of body temperature on image contrast in post mortem MRI.

Objective: To assess the temperature dependency of tissue contrast on post mortem magnetic resonance (PMMR) images both objectively and subjectively; and to visually demonstrate the changes of image contrast at various temperatures.

Materials And Methods: The study was approved by the responsible justice department and the ethics committee. The contrast of water, fat, and muscle was measured using regions of interest (ROI) in the orbit of 41 human corpses to assess how body temperature (range 2.

Reduction of background in optoacoustic image sequences obtained under tissue deformation.

For real-time optoacoustic imaging of the human body, a linear array transducer and reflection mode optical irradiation is preferably used. Experimental outcomes however revealed that such a setup results in significant image background, which prevents imaging structures at the ultimate depth limited only by the optical attenuation of the irradiating light and the signal noise level. Various sources of image background, such as bulk tissue absorption, reconstruction artifacts, and backscattered ultrasound, could be identified.