Public awareness of the use of clinical CT machines for postmortems

Background

Japan has one-third of the world's CT machines and the highest number of CT devices per million population. The lack of medical examiners to meet the needs of Japanese police authorities has therefore led to requests that CT scanners be used for both clinical and postmortem examination. However, hospitals believe that patients might feel uncomfortable with this dual use, so they usually advocate performing postmortem cases at night and not informing patients of the dual use of CT scanners. In this study, we investigated people's thoughts about the dual use of CT scanners.

Methods

In this internet-based questionnaire study, we wanted to understand public opinion about postmortem CT imaging. Specifically, we sought the opinions of the general public about the Japanese death investigation system and the use of CT machines for both the living and the dead.

Results

More than 70% of respondents wanted postmortem examinations to identify the cause of death, but only 34% were aware that CT was used for this purpose. Moreover, only 13% knew that postmortem CTs were performed at general hospitals using CT machines that are also used for patients, and 51.6% thought that hospitals should inform patients that CT machines are also used for postmortem examinations.

Conclusions

There are no rules for the use of the clinical CT machines for postmortem examination in Japan. However, we identified that half of our respondents wanted to be informed that hospitals use CT scanners to examine both the living and the dead.