Strangulation is the third most common homicide method in the UK, although women are even more likely to become a victim due to intimate partner violence [
1,
2]. Despite the frequent occurrence of such cases, the diagnosis of strangulation in forensic pathology is still predominantly one of exclusion, in particular if there is a lack of distinctive signs such as petechial bleeding or bruising of the soft tissues of the neck. Fractures of the laryngeal cartilages or the hyoid bone are considered evidence for strangulation but they can have other causes such as sports injuries, motor vehicle accidents or falls [
3]. Such fractures tend to be associated with haemorrhages, but absence thereof can make subtle injuries even more difficult to detect at the risk of potentially missing them during autopsy. In some cases, histological examination is conducted to examine fractures identified at postmortem to assess the timing of the injury in relation to time of death [
4]. This process is destructive, time consuming and costly. With advances in technology, new ways of dealing with this issue have emerged with many researchers advocating the use of computed tomography (CT) to study laryngeal trauma [
5,
6]. Even more recently, initial studies have explored the use of micro-computed tomography (micro-CT) to examine such cases in order to identify micro-fractures which might not be visible on medical CT or postmortem examination [
7,
8]. Micro-CT has proven successful in a number of different forensic applications such as toolmark analysis [
9‐
11], gunshot wound analysis [
12,
13] and forensic entomology [
14]. However, all of the existing literature on using micro-CT for laryngeal trauma analysis is based on casework; no comparative studies exist to date to the authors’ knowledge. This study aims to address this void as it draws on an unprecedented database of micro-CT scans of larynges from strangulation cases as well as from natural deaths. The injuries observed in the former group were compared with those in the latter control group of uninjured larynges from donor individuals in order to assess which features can occur in the normal population. Studies by Tsai et al. [
15] and Baier et al. [
16] have compared micro-CT to histology, the current gold standard for forensic injury analysis, and found the method to be reliable for injuries in bone. Method validation is becoming an increasing concern in forensic science and while micro-CT had been validated in industrial settings [
17‐
19] where the method as such has been proven to work, it has not been systematically tested for forensic purposes. This study forms an exploratory study to inform future more structured validation studies.