A good thing about virtual autopsy is that human hands do not have to touch the body and so will not be able to affect the body. This enables an objective examination. It is entirely non-invasive; there is no scalpel cutting into tissue. The advantage here is that multiple forensic scientists can do an examination, each with fresh eyes on a complete and unaffected body. A body examined in the traditional way will not allow for this option as it will already have had tissues damaged by the first examination.
When someone dies and their families want to bury them without their bodies being affected, Virtopsy can help preserve the physical state of the body. Additionally, Virtopsy is not restricted for use on the dead. It can be used to examine those still living as well. If someone is attacked, for example, but is still alive, Virtopsy may be able to discover some visual imprint left by the attacker on the victim's body. It is also safer for the living since evisceration of bodies can bring about some possible health risks to those who examine them. Virtopsy protects them form any exposure to disease.
Complete data for a body being examined can be gathered in under 30 minutes. Virtopsy also makes it possible to do systematic research on every part of the body which can take a lot of time in traditional autopsies. Any part of the body can be examined, such as the skeleton, and searched quickly for anything the pathologist wanted to check for in that part of the body.
The complete three-dimensional view of the body Virtopsy provides allows for easy virtual manipulation. Clothes and skin can be virtually removed and even parts of the body can be segregated from the rest of the body. This enables them to be viewed from all angles, making it easier to discover anything significant. This is especially useful in examining weapons used to injured victims, such as seeing the path of a bullet through a skull.
Despite the many advantages of Virtopsy, there are a few drawbacks. The imaging it uses does not show a proper documentation of body color the way pathologists can see it in traditional autopsies. It is hard to see any bleeding points in the body as well. There is also a tremendous amount of data provided, which can be hard to sift through for medical examiners.