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Development of a novel technique with a pigtail catheter and high-pressure injector for coronary postmortem computed tomography angiography

ABSTRACT Coronary post-mortem computed tomography angiography (coronary PMCTA) is a non-invasive method to evaluate the coronary artery in the forensic practice. A traditional method is to insert a urinary catheter through the carotid artery. In this study, we performed the coronary PMCTA by inserting a pigtail catheter through the femoral artery and connecting the catheter to a high-pressure syringe. We report the efficacy of this technique and factors influencing its performance, including the position of the catheter tip, aortic gas, high-pressure injector, and location of skin puncture. A total of 14 cadavers were included in our study. Two cadavers with coronary artery occlusions were identified in the PMCTA, which were confirmed by the autopsy reports. In addition, we found that adequate imaging of all the branches of the left and right coronary arteries could be achieved when the catheter tip was located in the ascending aorta around the aortic valve. Gas in the aorta could affect the image acquisitions, which could be avoided by priming the catheter with normal saline and changing the cadaver positions. The femoral artery insertion of the pigtail catheter with a high-pressure injector could achieve satisfactory images without causing obvious disfiguration of the cadavers.

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Application of postmortem MRI for identification of medulla oblongata contusion as a cause of death: a case report.

Whiplash injury is common in traffic accidents, and severe whiplash is characterized by cervical spinal cord injuries with cervical dislocation or fracture, that can be diagnosed by postmortem computed tomography (PMCT), postmortem magnetic resonance (PMMR), or conventional autopsy. However, for cervical spinal cord injury without fracture and dislocation, PMMR can be more informative because it provides higher resolution of soft tissues. We report the case of a 29-year-old male who died immediately following a traffic accident, in which the vehicle hit an obstacle at a high speed, causing deformation of the bumper and severe damage of the vehicle body. PMCT indicated no significant injuries or diseases related to death, but PMMR showed patchy abnormal signals in the medulla oblongata, and the lower edge of the cerebellar tonsil was herniated out of the foramen magnum. The subsequent pathological and histological results confirmed that death was caused by medulla oblongata contusion combined with cerebellar tonsillar herniation. Our description of this case of a rare but fatal whiplash injury in which there was no fracture or dislocation provides a better understanding of the potentially fatal consequences of cervical spinal cord whiplash injury without fracture or dislocation and of the underlying lethal mechanisms. Compared with PMCT, PMMR provides important diagnostic information in forensic practice for the identification of soft tissue injuries, and is therefore an important imaging modality for diagnosis of whiplash injury when there is no fracture or dislocation.

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Fusion News Elements of News Text Similarity Calculation

Text similarity is an effective metric for estimating the text matching degree between two or more texts. Vector Space Model (VSM) is employed for the text similarity calculation in most instances. However, it is insufficient and ill-suited to solve the complex tasks since the high calculation dimension and computational complexity. Therefore, it is crucial to calculate the similarity of two news text, so that whether two reported news is the identical event or the same type of information would be ascertained. According to the analysis of the news reports, five basic factors in terms of “when”, “where”, “what”, “why”, and “who” are taken into account for distinguishing a news report. By analyzing these features, in this study, a method to calculate the similarity of news text is proposed. The proposed method fully integrates the influence of the five news feature words into the evaluation of text similarity, which avoids the problem happened in the text interference and computational efficiency to a large extent. There are four steps to execute the proposed method, i.e. extraction of the news elements, classification of these elements, calculation of the similarity, and comparison with available literatures. Experimental results suggest that our proposal outperforms the vector space cosine coefficient method, Jaccard coefficient method and entropy method in terms of the time complexity and computational accuracy.

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