Atmosphere of departure in forensic medicine?

Forensic medicine aims for the documentation of medical and other forensic findings in living and deceased persons for the police and the judiciary system. While in forensic genetics and forensic toxicology, high technology procedures are part of the daily work, forensic pathology is still using the old established techniques from former centuries. New methods like 3D-surface scanning and modern radiology procedures like computed tomography (CT) or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) are becoming more and more part of scientific research in forensic sciences and are today part of the routine workflow in a some institutes of legal medicine. As a sign of this increasing interest the first Virtopsy basic course was held in September 2006 at the Center for Forensic Imaging/Virtopsy in the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Bern, Switzerland. Participants from Austria, Germany, Italy, Japan, Switzerland, Turkey and the USA took part in this first hands-on course in forensic radiology and surface scanning.