Virtual Autopsy: Virtobot, CT Scans and ABB Robots

A virtual autopsy uses scanners, and more and more often robots, to find out how a person died without cutting the body open. This post follows the job from the scalpel and the Y-shaped incision, through the Virtopsy project at the University of Bern with its CT, MRI and 3D surface scans, to the Virtobot, a robot arm that scans bodies and places biopsy needles under CT guidance. It covers the digital autopsy service that started in Greater Manchester in September 2026, the staff shortage in Irish mortuaries and where ABB robots could fit, then the open questions about cost, proof and the skills a robot-assisted mortuary needs.

A curator prepares a 550-year-old Peruvian child mummy for a CT scan at Naval Medical Center San Diego, April 2011. Photo: U.S. Navy via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

From the dissecting table to the CT scanner

For most of medical history an autopsy meant a knife. Morgagni linked patients' symptoms to changes in their organs after death, and in 1769 he published the first exhaustive work of pathology. In the mid-1800s Rokitansky and his colleagues in Vienna turned dissection into a tool for better diagnosis, and Virchow published fixed autopsy protocols to end inconsistent practice. A standard autopsy still follows that pattern: a deep Y-shaped incision from each shoulder down to the pubic bone, organs taken out, weighed and sliced for samples, and the skull opened with a reciprocating saw.

Rudolf Virchow, who published fixed autopsy protocols, photographed by J. C. Schaarwächter in 1891. Photo: J. C. Schaarwächter / Wellcome Collection via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

Fewer bodies now get that treatment. Hospital autopsy rates in Western countries have fallen every year since 1955. US rates dropped from 17 percent in 1980 to 11.5 percent in 1989, and in the UK only 0.7 percent of adult inpatient deaths in 2013 were followed by a consented autopsy. At the University of Bern, Richard Dirnhofer, the former head of its Institute of Forensic Medicine, proposed virtopsy, a mix of CT, MRI and 3D surface scanning, as a partial or complete replacement. Michael Thali led the research group, and in 2003 the British Museum asked for its help with Nesperennub, a 3,000-year-old mummy that could not be dissected without damage.

The painted coffin of Nesperennub at the British Museum, whose mummy the museum asked the Virtopsy team to examine in 2003. Photo: Jl FilpoC / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

A robot joined the method in 2010, when the team published the Virtobot. It combined an industrial six-axis robot on a linear axis that stretched its working space with a tool changer, its own safety system, a multi-slice CT scanner, photogrammetry and optical surface scanning, 3D tracking and a biopsy tool that placed needles automatically. Surface scans took half as long, calibration was three times faster and the biopsy module reached an accuracy of 3.2 mm. Virtobot 2.0, described in 2014, added an automatic tool change, new trajectory planning and automatic registration to the CT data, placed needles to within 1.4 mm in a phantom and carried out 24 surface documentations in 11 months.

A Siemens SOMATOM CT scanner at Northern Light CA Dean Hospital in Greenville, Maine, September 2024. Photo: USDA Rural Development via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Digital autopsies and robot needles in 2026

Post-mortem CT is now reaching routine coroner work. On 23 September 2026 Rochdale Borough Council said the Coroner's Office for Greater Manchester, working with the NHS, the post-mortem imaging provider Anubix and the imaging company TIC Health, had started a CT service that could cut the need for invasive post-mortems across Rochdale, Bury and Oldham by up to 80 percent. A number of scans are carried out each week. "Post-mortem CT means that, in many appropriate cases, we can provide the answers a coroner and family need without an invasive examination," said Anubix chief executive Natasha Davendralingam.

A Siemens NAEOTOM Alpha CT scanner at Lochotín University Hospital in Pilsen, Czech Republic, 2022. Photo: Tomáš Vendiš / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Mortuaries are also short of people. On 7 October the Irish Examiner reported that a lack of funding and recruitment in autopsy services was delaying funerals across Ireland. When an advanced mortuary technician at St Columcille's Hospital in County Dublin retired and was not replaced, the mortuary had to close for a time and bodies were moved, said Denis McCauley, president of the Irish Coroners' Society. Tallaght University Hospital said it had lacked a full complement of staff since 2019 amid a "chronic national shortage". A 2026 review in Diagnostics names falling autopsy rates, workforce shortages and biosafety among the reasons imaging and robotics are spreading.

The autopsy room of a hospital building at Fort McCoy, Wisconsin, with its wooden examining table, documented by the Historic American Buildings Survey. Photo: HABS / Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

In research, robots already handle parts of the job. A 2023 study used the Virtobot to place needles fully automatically for targeted CT angiography of the pulmonary arteries in eight deceased people, and the contrast agent reached the artery in six of them. The Virtopsy group has worked from the University of Zurich since 2011. ABB does not make forensic systems, and the Virtobot papers name only an industrial six-axis robot. ABB builds that class of arm, and its IRT 710 track, a seventh axis that extends a robot's working area with a repeatability of ±0.02 mm, mirrors the Virtobot's linear-axis layout. Such tracks are set up as external axes in RobotStudio, but using them for virtopsy remains a possibility.

An ABB robot rides a floor track while handling crates at a Dutch food plant, the robot on a linear axis layout the Virtobot also uses. Photo: ABB

What robot-guided autopsy still has to prove

The newer systems are moving out of special rooms. During the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers built a robotic biopsy system for bodies kept inside protective body bags and tested it on 20 corpses, some of them infected with SARS-CoV-2, with a mean needle placement accuracy of about 7 mm. In 2026 another team described a mobile robot that scans the body surface in colour and depth from three base positions, covering 92.45 percent of the surface on real corpses, because floor or ceiling-mounted robots need specialised rooms. Needle-guiding robots also work on living patients, as our prostate biopsy robot post shows.

Stained and mounted tissue slides in a 20-slide folder, the kind of histology work that robot-guided biopsies supply. Photo: Ed Uthman / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

For families, virtual autopsy is non-invasive, so it may be less traumatic for relatives and may avoid religious objections, and the scan data can be examined again even after burial or cremation. For forensic institutes the work starts to look like a factory cell, with needle paths, tool changes and scanning routes that a robot repeats the same way each time. A cobot such as ABB's GoFa, which ABB builds to work beside people without fencing, could assist mortuary staff in a setup like that, although no such use has been reported. In Greater Manchester, the stated goal is faster answers for relatives.

An ABB GoFa cobot at ABB Robotics' healthcare research hub. Photo: ABB

The equipment is expensive, and scans make it hard to tell wounds made before death from those made after it. Virtopsy still lacks proper prospective validation, a known error rate and juridical validity, and surface scanners miss concave, shiny and transparent areas. The 2026 Diagnostics review concludes that conventional autopsy remains the indispensable reference standard and that AI should for now be treated as an assistive tool. Skills are a hurdle too. The Virtobot's developers described Virtopsy as a project spanning forensic science, diagnostic imaging, computer science, automation technology, telematics and biomechanics, which is a lot of expertise to find under one roof.

An engineer programs a robot cell in RobotStudio next to an ABB industrial robot. Photo: ABB

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