Fa yi xue za zhi
-
Since first application of computed tomography (CT) in postmortem examination in 1990, investigators have been discussing the value and advantage of CT in full-body examination in cadaver. CT examination before autopsy is able to provide not only the informations to guide the autopsy, but also the significant findings to analysis the causes of death, which may be not fount in autopsy. This review focuses on the value of CT in analysis of the death causes, injury manners, and personal identifications in postmortem examination as well as its development in the field of forensic medicine. It is our belief that CT in combination with other newly developed technologies will make more contribution to forensic medicine in the future.
-
Ketamine is a phencyclidine derivative acting primarily as a noncompetitive antagonist of N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) excitatory glutamate receptors. As a common intravenous anaesthetic in clinic, it is also increasingly abused because of its hallucination and addiction effects. Based on the pharmacological and toxicologic characteristics of ketamine and the acknowledged addiction mechanism of other abused drugs, this article reviews the possible addiction mechanism of the ketamine in the aspects of its enhanced effects and reward systems, the anatomic structures, the related receptors and the individual differences.
-
Air embolism, a life-threatening complication of medical procedure, is a frequently encountered challenge in the forensic practices. It can be easily missed due to ignorance by forensic examiner or it could be difficult to be identified due to prolonged storage of the cadaver. This article reviews the etiological factors, pathophysiological changes, clinical manifestation, diagnosis, and the medicolegal identification of air embolism. The authors suggest that modern imaging techniques including echocardiogram, computer tomography, and magnetic resonance imaging play animportant role in the clinical diagnosis and forensic identification of air embolism.
-
Ketamine is a noncompetitive NMDA receptor antagonist and comes into being a new problem of drug abuse. It can cause a certain extent of hallucination, which makes ketamine be abused in the casinos. The paper reviews the pharmacological and toxicology characteristic of Ketamine, the possible physiological mechanism and the methods for detecting Ketamine abuse.
-
Positional asphyxia of restraint means that when an individual was limited in an abnormal body position, asphyxia would take place owing to the disorder of spontaneous respiratory function, and finally it lead to die. So, it belongs to a special type of the mechanical asphyxia. From the cases reported, we could found that it would take place in several conditions. ⋯ Following the more cases reported, many experts of forensic medicine had investigated it on the mechanism of death and the standard of identification, but they could not reach to agreements. So, they have changed the directions of the researches, began to value the factors of risk and research how to avoid it. In the following text, the mechanism of death, factors of risk, preventive methods, standard of identification and prospecting of positional asphyxia of restraint were reviewed.