Visualizing microscopic hemorrhages with Susceptibility-Weighted Imaging (SWI) for forensic applications

There are several pathological conditions which are combined with hemorrhages caused by physical injuries like shaken baby syndrome. Until recently main clinical examination for these conditions is Computed Tomography, which is not successful in all cases and emits ionizing radiation. A new and reliable technique is SWI, which is a postprocessing step performed on a T2∗-weighted image. SWI enhance the image contrast and makes tissue visible that contains deoxyhemoglobin - an iron-containing transport protein. Blood-Oxygen-Level- Dependent imaging is already integrated in clinical application but SWI is still at the research stage and shows much potential. Our goal in this project was to investigate brain samples, which contain hemorrhages, by using SWI. The results show that this technique works very sensitive to hemorrhages and makes them clearly visible, which opens a new area for the forensic pathology. However, it needs further studies to support the results and to investigate the scope of SWI.