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Pathology Update 2025
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Scientific Session - Forensic - Faculty of Postmortem Imaging Session

Scientific

Scientific

11:00 am

23 February 2025

Meeting Rooms 111 & 112

Discipline Streams

Forensic Pathology

Chairs

Session Scientific Program

Sarah Constantine1,2
1FSSA; 2Forensics NT

Identification of remains, both recently and non-recently deceased is a small but important part of forensic radiology. Many practitioners involved with postmortem imaging do not have any training and little experience in this area.
 
This presentation explains some basic principles of forensic anthropology and disaster victim identification that may be extremely useful in assisting in the identification of unknown remains, utilising postmortem CT imaging.
Chris O'Donnell1
1VIFM

Purpose: To provide an overview of Terson syndrome, ability of PMCT to detect retinal haemorrhage and its relevance in medicolegal death investigation.

Discussion: Originally described in 1881 and popularised by Terson in 1900, this clinical syndrome is characterised by retinal haemorrhage in the context of spontaneous subarachnoid haemorrhage (SAH). It was once conjectured that subarachnoid blood passed through the optic nerve sheath into the retina, but anatomical studies have shown that the arachnoid ends at the sclera. It is now thought that acute raised intracranial pressure associated with SAH leads to retinal venous obstruction, resultant venous ischaemia and subsequent haemorrhage.  This is confirmed on clinical fluorescein angiography. Retinal haemorrhage can be detected on PMCT as a crescent of high Hounsfield unit density and in our series of 456 fatal non-traumatic SAH cases, was detected in 20 (4.4%).

Conclusion:
  Retinal haemorrhage following spontaneous SAH (Terson syndrome) can be detected on PMCT, and its significance is important for forensic pathologists to understand, as it is not necessarily a portent of preceding head trauma.
Craig Hacking

I will present a case-based review of basic CT and MRI neuroanatomy using online public cases from Radiopaedia.org. The presentation will focus on neuroanatomy pertinent to the anatomical and forensic pathologist.

Resources