VSDFullBody: Postmortem Whole Body CT Scans for Biomedical Research

VSDFullBody is a reupload of anonymized postmortem CT scans of the whole body originally published by Michael Kistler through the SICAS Medical Image Repository. The data was provided by the forensic institutes of the universities of Bern and Zürich and shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license after ethical approval. The collection has been used for creating surface models of the lower body's osseous anatomy.

Use Cases

• Training medical image segmentation models based on full-body CT scans.
• Developing statistical shape models for biomechanical simulation based on cadaver anatomy.
• Creating 3D surface models of bones for anatomical education or surgical planning.
• Conducting forensic anthropology research based on postmortem imaging data.

Strengths

• Data originates from established forensic institutes at the universities of Bern and Zürich.
• Shared under a specific open license (CC BY-NC-SA) after formal ethical approval.
• The dataset has been used in published scientific research, including a paper in Scientific Data.

Limitations

• Description metadata is limited; actual data quality requires manual inspection after download.
• The uploader notes the original VSD contains a few inconsistencies, such as duplicate CT datasets.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.

Provenance

Source

SICAS Medical Image Repository (SMIR), forensic institutes of the universities of Bern and Zürich.

Collection Method

Postmortem CT scans collected from cadavers.

Geography

Switzerland (specifically Bern and Zürich).