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In fiction, hard-pressed pathologists presented with a corpse are able to take a bite of their sandwich and instantly pronounce a time of death.
在小说中，高压下的病理学家面对一具尸体，只要咬一口三明治，就能立即判断出死亡时间。
Reality is, of course, a lot messier, and the results—or lack of them—can make or break a case.
当然，现实要混乱得多，结果（或者没有结果）可能决定案件的成败。
Now artificial intelligence is offering a helping hand.
现在，人工智能正在伸出援助之手。
By analysing thousands of deaths and what follows, the technology can offer the best estimates so far of the post-mortem interval (pmi).
通过分析数以千计的死亡案例及其后续情况，该技术可以提供迄今为止对死后间隔时间（pmi）的最佳估计。
Working out when a person has died is the most basic (but frustratingly imprecise) part of a forensic investigator’s work.
确定死亡时间是法医调查员工作中最基本的一部分，但令人沮丧的是，无法精确判断。
For decades these specialists have had to rely on intuition, combined with observations of the state of the deceased and clues such as temperature, both of the dead body and the environment.
几十年来，这些专家不得不依靠直觉，结合对死者状态的观察以及尸体和环境温度等线索。
Different bodies decay at different rates, however, and individual circumstances can throw off the most careful pmi calculations.
然而，不同尸体的腐烂速度不同，个别情况可能会使最仔细的pmi计算失效。
A body found in a ditch in northern England in 2004, for example, was given an erroneously late time of death because the ditch was shielded from sunlight and the colder-than-expected conditions had helped preserve the corpse.
例如，2004年在英格兰北部的一条沟渠中发现的一具尸体，其死亡时间被错误地推迟了，因为沟渠遮挡了阳光，而且比预期更冷的环境有助于保存尸体。
Forensic-science journals are full of such cases—some routine, others bizarre—while the potentially useful details of thousands more investigations are buried in case files around the world.
法医学期刊上充斥着此类案件，有些是常规案件，有些则是离奇案件，同时，世界各地的案件卷宗中还埋藏着成千上万起调查中可能有用的细节。
Now forensic researchers in America are working to access and compile these valuable write-ups, and to use machine learning to analyse them.
现在，美国的法医研究人员正在努力获取和汇编这些有价值的资料，并利用机器学习对其进行分析。
The result is an ai-powered tool, called geofor, that could offer the most reliable estimates of pmi so far. Sandwiches are not included.
其结果是一个名为geofor的人工智能工具，可以提供迄今为止最可靠的pmi估算值。三明治不包括在内。
Developed by a research team led by Katherine Weisensee at Clemson University in South Carolina, the model is based on data pooled from more than 2,500 death investigations, with more added each week.
该模型由南卡罗来纳州克莱姆森大学凯瑟琳·韦森塞（Katherine Weisensee）领导的研究团队开发，基于2500多起死亡调查的数据，每周都有新的数据加入。
About 1,800 of these are real-world cases involving the discovery of a body.
其中约1800起是发现尸体的真实案件。
The rest are drawn from forensic experiments at so-called “body farms” in Texas and Tennessee, in which corpses are left to decay for weeks and months under varied circumstances.
其余数据来自德克萨斯州和田纳西州所谓的“尸体农场”的法医实验，在这些农场里，尸体会在不同的环境下腐烂数周甚至数月。
