ORLANDO, Fla. — Some autopsies in Central Florida will soon be completed without making a single cut.
Orange County is buying a CT scan machine currently being used in fewer than 10 places worldwide.
The CT scan will be able to show tiny fractures and injuries in places that are normally difficult to locate.
The machine turns a body into thousands of very thin virtual slices without the use of a scalpel.
Each three dimensional layer will be about the thickness of five pieces of paper stacked together, and it provides much more information than an X-ray.
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The state requires an autopsy in each murder case.
Orange County is purchasing a new $500,000 CT scan machine for the morgue that will make the process less invasive in some situations and more accurate when examining skeletal trauma, especially in the spinal cord, hands and feet.
"Another would be the vessels in your neck," said Dr. Joshua Stephany, the chief medical examiner of Orange and Osceola counties. "Neck dissections are very difficult. And when you're doing them, you may obliterate what you're looking for."
Three-dimensional imaging showing every inch of the body will be ready within two minutes.
"We can present those to the state attorney who could present them to a jury," Stephany said.
Should an autopsy reveal blunt force trauma to the head as the cause of death, sometimes medical examiners stop there.
Stephany won't dissect faces out of respect for families, but the CT scan will show injuries to the face, like that which might be seen on a child abuse victim, possibly strengthening a criminal case.
"We can look at the digits of the hands and the feet, so we can see all these little microfractures," Stephany said.
He said the software will improve the process if another mass causality situation, such as the Pulse terror attack, happens again in Central Florida, because a bullet is harder to find in two dimensions.
"If we had a CT scan at that time, those individuals could have come in, get a full body scan, we would have known exactly where the projectiles are in three dimensions," Stephany said. "And the speed would've been much faster."
This will also be a good option for those who choose to not have an autopsy performed for religious reasons.
The medical examiner's office expects to get this machine within the year.
The technology's use won't be limited to criminal cases. The CT scan can also determine if a person died of heart disease or a brain bleed.