Can Forensic Pathologists Diagnose Pulmonary Thromboembolism on Postmortem Computed Tomography Pulmonary Angiography?

Postmortem computed tomography (CT) scanning is a routine examination in the medicolegal death investigation of every deceased person admitted to the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine. Pulmonary CT angiography is a standard clinical investigation for suspected pulmonary thromboembolism. To the best of our knowledge, a study of postmortem CT pulmonary angiography has not been previously reported in the English-speaking forensic literature. We present our findings on 13 cases of suspected massive pulmonary thromboembolism where forensic pathologists assessed postmortem CT pulmonary angiography, which were then correlated with conventional postmortem examinations.