Verbal Autopsy

Verbal autopsy is a method for assigning a probable cause of death by interviewing the caregivers or relatives of a person who died, used where medical certification and vital registration are weak or absent. A trained interviewer administers a structured questionnaire about the signs, symptoms, and circumstances preceding death, and the resulting symptom profile is converted into a cause of death — historically by physician review, and increasingly by automated tools. Two computer-based approaches dominate: the probabilistic InterVA model, formalized for InterVA-4 by Peter Byass and colleagues in 2012 and aligned with the WHO instrument, and the Tariff method behind SmartVA, developed and validated by Christopher Murray and the Population Health Metrics Research Consortium (PHMRC) in 2014. Verbal autopsy supplies cause-of-death data for roughly the majority of the world's deaths that occur without medical attendance.