"Not really; not always; and sometimes not even with causes of death you’d think would show up easily in a good scan. Doctors take far too much confidence in scan results, feeling they see everything with certainty. They don’t. As a Florida coroner told me a few years ago, “We get this all the time. The doctors get our report and call and say, ‘But there can’t be a lacerated aorta. We did a whole set of scans.’"

I would note that postmortem scans, done once the patient is deceased, can be substantially higher fidelity, because there is no concern about radiation exposure in X-ray tomography of arbitrary contrast and number of slices, and after that metal bits can be removed at will for MRI of arbitrary strength, duration, and confinement on a nonmoving subject. Blood tests can be run in standard panels. DNA tests can reveal CoD correlations.

All of this, streamlined, without a surgical autopsy & reporting being performed, seems like a tractable middle ground.