访谈录[Interview]2007-12-02:CSI的新武器（在线收听）

There is a new technology that could help crime scene investigators solve cases faster. Our own Dr. Sanjay Gupta is actually a crime scene investigator.
I don't know what is it you don't do Sanjay, i gotta tell you. You are at the land this morning, and are there some new tools that could help you and others who do this. Find out causes maybe more accurately and quicker.

Yeah, this is really interesting, Karin. Actually, you know, when you take a look at typicl autopsies, you can take hours, even days. We talk a lot about that as we cover deaths of people who are in the media, for example, and figure how long it takes for some of the results to come back. Well, there's been a group of reserchers trying to figure out ways to do this a lot faster. Now there's a techonology out there known as full body CAT scans ,you may've heard of that, but the idea was what about action instead of performing an actual autopsy.

Do we want these full body CAT scans and seeing how good the results might be, how comparable might be to an actual autopsy. Let me give you an example. For in non-homicides when accidental blunt traumas such as car accident or something like that, you could get a full body CAT scan. I should take a look at CAT scan on their heads specifically and figure out if there was specific damage. Here is a CAT scan ,you can see them on your screen. Basically, if you are looking at this CAT scan which they would get within minutes literally, you can tell pretty quickly that there's actully a lot of air here in the brain. And you can see in that black area is all air that's not supposed to be there ,and also there's a layer of blood in here as well. And that suggests that there were some sort of blunt force trauma to the head, that would confirm what the, what the pathologist might suspect as a possible cause of the death, for example, due to a car accident.

As part of the study, i currenly actually did 20 of this full body CAT scans and then compare the results to actual autopsies. And there were dead on. So this might be a very very quick way to get a sense, not homisize but it's accidental blunt trauma.
And with homicide, Karin, for example, people's on gunshot, when you wanna see if there was gun powder on the skin for example, of stabbling ,you wanna get a sense of the force to the impact. She can't tell that from CAT scan, but she can get a lot of other information.

You also have another techonology that can help, i know this has more been, um, but you know, got forbidden in the mass disasters, and is a main, big disaster where you have mass casualities they can help. At least provide some comfort for the families by being able to identify people faster.

Yeah, you know, as much as we talk about all these sophisticated techonology out there, in those mass casualty situations that you were alluding to, the way that most pathologists have actually approaches is through dental records, old fashion but very effective. part of the problem  is if you look at dental records from all ,dental records comparing to new, sometimes they don't quite match.
And it's hard to actually figure out if it's in fact the same person. So what they actually created is a software let me show you this as well, a software that will immediately collates the two images to make them look like identical. So you get a sense at that ,if you take a look at the image there ,you see in the left that this maybe a little bit hard for you to figure out, this is 290 pixellations , and this is 254. And it's hard to the untrained eye to tell that this is in fact the same person what the software does is immediately convertes so in fact they are very similar pexilations ,290 to 291. And you get a very clear idea if this is in fact the same person. And make that identification very quickly. So again it's all in the name of speed, it's all in the name of accuracy ,but this radiograph for the dental records CAT scans seem be a good tools.