Volume 26, Issue 124, June 2022

Diffuse tomography of human organ samples to establish the postmortem interval in alcohol and carbon monoxide poisoning

Ihor Ivaskevych, Oleg Vanchuliak

Department of Forensic Medicine and Law, Bukovinian State Medical University, Chernivtsi, Ukraine

ABSTRACT

Establishing of time interval that has elapsed since the death of a person has been and continues to be one of the most important issues to be addressed by a forensic expert during the autopsy. The main issue is to investigate and substantiate the information capabilities of the objective method of diffuse tomography of fluctuations of circular birefringence of histological sections of biological tissues (BT) in the diagnosis of post-mortem interval (PMI) in alcohol and carbon monoxide poisoning and also the possibility of their differentiation. The object of the study was histological sections of the brain, liver, adrenal glands, myocardium and polycrystalline blood films, selected from 150 corpses of both sexes, aged 20 to 68 years, with previously known time since death (TSD), ranging from 1 to 70 hours. The task of developing objective digital criteria for forensic diagnostics of PMI in alcohol and СО poisoning is based on the fluctuation of circular birefringence (FCB) of the polycrystalline component of humans BT. According to the results, a statistically significant possibility of differentiation of cases of alcohol and CO poisoning and TSD determination in the range of 20 to 48 hours (up to 0.5 hours) for the method of FCB of polycrystalline component of histological sections of adrenal glands.

Keywords: post-mortem interval, carbon monoxide poisoning, alcoholpoisoning, polarization, laser polarimetry

Medical Science, 2022, 26, ms251e2341

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.54905/disssi/v26i124/ms251e2341

Published: 27 June 2022