Identification of Pulmonary Edema in Forensic Autopsy Cases of Sudden Cardiac Death Using Fourier Transform Infrared Microspectroscopy: A Pilot Study

Abstract

Many studies have proven the usefulness of biofluid-based infrared spectroscopy in the clinical domain for diagnosis and monitoring the progression of diseases. Here we present a state-of-the-art study in the forensic field that employed Fourier transform infrared microspectroscopy for postmortem diagnosis of sudden cardiac death (SCD) by in situ biochemical investigation of alveolar edema fluid in lung tissue sections. The results of amide-related spectral absorbance analysis demonstrated that the pulmonary edema fluid of the SCD group was richer in protein components than that of the neurologic catastrophe (NC) and lethal multiple injuries (LMI) groups. The complementary results of unsupervised principle component analysis (PCA) and genetic algorithm-guided partial least-squares discriminant analysis (GA-PLS-DA) further indicated different global spectral band patterns of pulmonary edema fluids between these three groups. Ultimately, a random forest (RF) classification model for postmortem diagnosis of SCD was built and achieved good sensitivity and specificity scores of 97.3% and 95.5%, respectively. Classification predictions of unknown pulmonary edema fluid collected from 16 cases were also performed by the model, resulting in 100% correct discrimination. This pilot study demonstrates that FTIR microspectroscopy in combination with chemometrics has the potential to be an effective aid for postmortem diagnosis of SCD.

Biochemical detection of fatal hypothermia and hyperthermia in affected rat hypothalamus tissues by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy

“…Nevertheless, our FTIR-based results show that the biochemical profiles of fatal hypothermic, fatal hyperthermic and normothermic hypothalamus tissues were significantly different. This study, supported by our previous studies [89,90], demonstrates that some tissues or organs regarded as nonspecific for the determination of the cause of death in forensic pathology do indeed have specific biochemical fingerprints. There is a high potential for this technique to augment the results of conventional forensic post-mortem examination and provide for a more accurate determination of the cause of death.…”

Phosphonate coating of SiO2 nanoparticles abrogates inflammatory effects and local changes of the lipid composition in the rat lung: a complementary bioimaging study

“…1 Effects of SiO 2 -n and SiO 2 -p NPs in vitro. a - d Dose dependent effects of SiO 2 -n and SiO 2 -p (22.5, 45, 90, and 180 μg·mL − 1 ) on NR8383 cells, taken from [ 54 ]. Release of a lactate dehydrogenase (LDH), b glucuronidase (Glu), c H 2 O 2 , and d tumor necrosis factor α (TNF-α).…”

“…As a whole, the locally enhanced lung lipid content in SiO 2 -NP laden areas observed here by means of FT-IR analysis appears to be in line with older results. Application of FT-IR spectroscopy therefore may become important in the field of lung toxicology and histology [ 54 ].…”

Determination of causes of death via spectrochemical analysis of forensic autopsies‐based pulmonary edema fluid samples with deep learning algorithm

“…Pulmonary edema fluid is usually considered to be nonspecific biological evidence regarding the cause of death determination in forensic autopsies because it is ubiquitous in forensic histopathological analysis. In fact, several studies have demonstrated that pulmonary edema fluid associated with different causes of death involves different specific biochemical and mRNA expression patterns . Unlike blood serum, one of the most common samples for biochemical and toxical tests in forensic investigations and that can easily be contaminated by the visible blood composition, pulmonary edema fluid is stored in the alveolar space and protected by the alveolar wall, which acts as a screen that excludes the visible blood composition (see Figure 3A).…”