Comment Re:Necessary? (Score 5, Informative) 199
I am a pathology resident who has done about ten autopsies and from my limited experience I can say that this practice is absolutely necessary. The reasoning behind sectioning the brain is to obtain tissue for histologic examination (i.e. under a microscope). This is done to correlate clinical or radiologic findings with actual disease processes.
A simple example would be a case of a small brain hemorrhage, where the radiologist thinks he/she sees some bleeding in a certain area of the brain. On autopsy, we can slice up the brain, take sections to be processed and placed on a glass slide, and actually look at the brain microscopically to confirm that there was indeed hemorrhage in the area of brain suspected by the radiologist.
Also, brain sectioning/microscopic evaluation can reveal lesions or abnormalities that are not visible to the radiologist (i.e. early Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, etc.)