[Expert systems in forensic medicine. Pilot project in the differential diagnosis of death caused by hanging]

The special field of legal medicine represents a very heterogeneous science, which makes it impossible, that a forensic pathologist could be an "expert" in all areas. The most recent achievements of computer-technology have opened up the possibility of being able to use a PC to produce an "expert system", for with large computer programs are needed. Therefore we wanted to test in a pilot project, if it was possible to establish an expert system, which was suitable for supporting forensic pathological diagnosis. We confined ourselves to the differential diagnosis of "death by hanging" where a clear line between vital and postmortal events, respectively suicide, homicide and accident was drawn. The discrepancy between the relatively scanty amount of statistically reliable data on the one hand and the complexity of the manifestation of death by hanging on the other hand proved to be the main problem. Although we are not yet able to make an expert system available which meets all our requirements, we are convinced, that in the future computer-aided diagnosis may be of great use for work in legal medicine.