The overarching aim of the Methods Toolbox is to implement complementary state-of-the-art methods in the examination of autopsy specimens to substantially improve the understanding of a novel or rare disease, its organ manifestations, and underlying pathogenicity mechanisms.
The toolbox to be applied herein is composed of the following high-end methods:
- Minimal invasive autopsy (MIA) to augment postmortal tissue retrieval on a broader scale
- Omics/single-cell transcriptomics High-resolution methods, on the pathogen and host side in autopsy tissues significantly contribute to the understanding of a novel and known disease, its organ manifestations, and underlying pathogenicity mechanisms
- Advanced Imaging technologies Complementary to the sequencing data, microscopic innovative imaging techniques will be applied
- Finally, in Digitalization/Artificial Intelligence (AI), digitalization of imaging data will enable computational analysis and the development of a discriminative model using AI. All involved centers are already experienced and have available infrastructure that will be available for the project and will allow them to tackle the specific tasks.
