Estimation of the time of death based on the measurements of the eye temperature in comparison with other body sites

: A systematic two-stage study was conducted in pigs to verify the models of postmortem body temperature decrease currently employed in forensic medicine. During the investigations, temperature recordings were performed in four body sites (eyeballs, orbit soft tissues, muscles and rectums). The results of the study support the possible use of the eyeball and also the orbit soft tissues as temperature measuring sites at the early phase after death; they have narrowed the significance of rectum temperature measurements to the late stage of postmortem body temperature decrease, shown insignificant correlations between the body weight and the temperature decrease rate constant and illustrated the functional increase of the time of death estimation error as the body cools, expressed in the distinct tendency to overestimate the calculated time of death as compared to the actual one. In the second stage of the experiment, a lack of a plateau phase was demonstrated, at least from 30 min post mortem. It was also found that in the very early post mortem period, the kinetics of cooling of all the body sites studied was better described by the two-exponential model than the single exponential one. The study also showed that the weak airflow present in the experimental conditions did not practically affect the course of cooling of the investigated body sites. Eyeball temperature measurements with an infra-red laser thermometer performed during the experiment proved to be of no use for determination of the time of death. The experiments allowed for defining the so far unreported value of physiological temperature of pig eyeball as 38 degrees C.