Thesis (Ph.D.) - Cairo University - Faculty of Medicine - Department of Forensic Medicine and Toxicology

Diagnosis of brain edema on the dead bodies is of practical importance for forensic pathologists. Cerebral edema is excess accumulation of fluid in the intracellular or extracellular spaces of the brain. Edema. It can quickly cause serious problems including death and it's usually more difficult to treat. As your body's master control system, the brain is critical to overall function. Yet, the thick, bony skull that protects this vital organ provides little room for the brain to swell (Raslan and Bhardwaj, 2007). Swelling can occur in specific locations or throughout the brain. Wherever it occurs, brain swelling increases pressure inside the skull and this pressure can prevent blood from flowing to the brain, which deprives it of the oxygen it needs to function. Swelling can also block other fluids from leaving your brain, making the swelling even worse. Damage or death of brain cells may result (Papadopoulos and Verkman, 2013). A reliable method of evaluating the presence of a brain edema includes measuring the weight of the brain. However, given the fact that there is a wide range of variation of the volume of the cranial cavity; it is very difficult to diagnose a border-line case of brain edema. In these cases brain edema can only be diagnosed by pathohistological examination(Jiang et al, 2014). The time-consuming pathohistological examination is the 2gold standard3 in verifying the presence of brain edema. It is based on subjective assessment of several macroscopic characteristics of the brain and inspecting the brain on cross sections (Radojevic, et al. 2017)

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