THE OLD Jewish woman was obviously very ill when she was admitted to North Manchester General Hospital, but it wasn’t clear what was wrong. Before she could be properly examined, she died.

Normally a pathologist would have performed a post mortem examination, removing organs to determine the cause of death. Instead her body was taken to the radiological department. There, Rob Bisset, the chief radiologist, used an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scanner to perform a “virtual” post mortem: without marking the body in any way, the machine produced vivid, detailed images of the internal organs and soft tissue, which revealed that they were riddled with cancer.

Post mortems are restricted under Jewish law, but five years ago Bisset was approached by the local community to see if MRI scans could be used in cases of non-suspicious death where a post mortem would otherwise be required. He has now performed about 100 of them.

Every year about a quarter of those who die in England and Wales undergo a post mortem. Many relatives, especially in the wake of scandals over the removal of body parts, find the procedure upsetting.

But could the traditional post mortem become a thing of the past? The Department for Health is inviting applications to test the reliability of the new technique.

“Pathologists are still pretty suspicious of using scanning,” Bisset says, “but in cases where we know that MRI can provide reliable information about tissue damage or organ malfunction in life, there’s no reason why they shouldn’t do so in death. In fact, as there is no breathing or blood flow, the images are much sharper.”

It seems that scans are good at picking up signs of damage to the brain and nervous system and at detecting heart failure. However, few machines yet have the resolution to view some of the smaller blood vessels around the heart, and they can’t detect the colour of organs, which may be a useful indicator of illness. Scans are also ineffective in cases involving poisons, drugs or high glucose levels because they can’t spot changes in blood chemistry.

While Bisset is providing a service in non-controversial cases, a group of Swiss forensic pathologists is looking at using scans in crime work. The bodies of murder victims are being scanned with a combination of MRI and CAT at the University Medical Centre in Bern to create “cyber” corpses whose wounds can be viewed from any depth or angle.

“Virtual post mortems have so far proved effective at detecting internal bleeding, bullet paths and the hidden fractures than can often be hard to find in a real body,” says Professor Michael Thali, the lead pathologist.

Most valuable, though, is virtual autopsies’ ability to reveal the air bubbles that stick in blood vessels after a wound of some sort, tell-tale signs that often vanish as soon as a scalpel cuts into the body. So far, Thali has conducted 100 virtual post mortems, each followed by a real one to compare results. “We need about 100 more before we are ready for the court,” he says.

Despite Thali’s accumulation of evidence that virtual post mortems could be a valuable part of forensics, there is no shortage of sceptics. “Virtual post mortems don’t produce truly objective data,” says Michael Graham, the president of the American National Association of Medical Examiners. “They produce images which someone has to interpret.”

Professional caution and costs — scanners cost $1 million (£524,000) each, plus the experts needed to run them — make it unlikely that they will become widespread any time soon. But it’s clear that they can provide valuable extra data in certain difficult cases and could reduce significantly the need for post mortems in the long run.