Nobody wants to think about their loved ones dying, let alone being opened and examined on the autopsy table. For many of us, there’s something sacrilegious about a medical examiner (sorry Dr. G), no matter how respectful, plunking your aunt’s innards down on a scale and weighing them. But autopsies can yield a plethora of information, marking the pathology of a disease or tracing the deadly path of a weapon. And you don’t always have to slice open dead people to do it.

In a virtual autopsy, medical examiners scan the corpses and then use tools such as MRI and CT imaging to get the 3-D answers they seek about cause of death. A virtual autopsy could serve as a less-invasive, less subjective, longer-lasting, digitized record of death, as well as an option for people who traditionally object to autopsies for religious or other reasons. There’s even a trademarked name for the term – virtopsy – coined by leaders in the field at the Institute of Forensic Medicine at the University of Bern in Switzerland.

The U.S. armed forces have been performing a version of a virtual autopsy on all service men and women killed in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2004, according to Denise Grady’s article in the New York Times. The armed forces, however, are using both virtual and real autopsies to help pathologists and to create a huge database for figuring out stuff like how to improve body armor effectiveness.

Think of it. Even if you opt to be cremated, your digitized corpse could essentially live on forever in a computer database.

Read more morbid but fascinating stuff at HowStuffWorks.com:
How Autopsies Work
How Body Farms Work
How Dying Works
How Crime Scene Investigation Works
How Bloodstain Pattern Analysis Works