A Self-inflicted Pneumatic Nail Gun Head Injury / 대한법의학회지

A nail gun is a type of a tool used to drive nails into some kinds of hard materials. In this paper, an unusual case of intracranial penetrating nail gun injury is presented. The body of a badly charred man was found following a house fire. Autopsy revealed four intracranial nails in the occipital area. Also, tears of the stomach and diaphragm were found. Carbon monoxide saturation of a blood sample was a 5.2% and a small amount of soot was present in larynx and trachea. Subsequent investigation of the circumstance and autopsy findings strongly suggest that the deceased had shot himself in the head with a pneumatic nail gun and had died by self immolation.

A Falsely Reported Case That Cell Phone Battery Explosion Caused Death / 대한법의학회지

A 34 year-old excavator driver was found dead at stone quarry in Cheongwon, North Chungcheong Province, with a severely burnt mobile phone in his shirt pocket and with his chest bruised and ribs fractured. An emergency physician examined him and said that high pressure from an explosion damaged his lungs and heart, leading to his death. So, a number of Korean and foreign newspapers reported that phone battery explosion killed the man. Autopsy showed that the deceased had fractures all over the chest and lacerations of the heart and the lungs. The damages seemed too extensive to be caused by a single mobile phone explosion. Lithium-ion polymer batteries used in mobile phones can catch fire by external forces but they hardly explode like a bomb. We recommended police to reinvestigate the scene and co-worker. So, police reinvestigated the accident scene and the co-worker. The co-worker told police that he hit the deceased while reversing his drill rig at a stone quarry. The incident reminds of us that our postmortem investigation system must be revised.

Primary Intracranial Choriocarcinoma: Case Report

Primary intracranial choriocarcinoma is a extremely rare neoplasm since the case was reported by Askanasy, in 1906, there have been 35 reported, even if germinal neoplasms containing chorocarcinoma-like tissue are added. But pure choriocarcinoma was rarely reported. The purpose of this paper is to report a case of 18-year-old boy with tumor in subependymal region around left frontal horn, which was present with high level of serum beta chain of chorionic gonadotropin(B-HCG) and was verified as germine choriocarcinoma by biopay.