Police say an autopsy will begin at 1 p.m. Thursday afternoon to begin the process of identifying the human remains found in a suitcase in Lake Ontario on Wednesday.

Two boaters discovered the badly decomposed remains about 2 kilometres off shore of Bluffer's Park in Scarborough.

During the post-mortem a tissue or blood sample will be taken and submitted to the Centre of Forensic Sciences and then processed for DNA. A profile from that sample will then be compared with the data bank for any possible matches.

Police say there's no way to know exactly when those identification results will come back as it could take anywhere from 24 hours to a few days.

Investigators hope the autopsy can determine or rule out if the remains belong to Guang Hua Liu, the dismembered Toronto woman whose remains were found in Mississauga and Scarborough earlier this month. Her torso was not discovered.

The torso was so badly decomposed that it wasn't immediately know if it had belonged to a man or a woman. It's believed that gender should be able to be determined following the autopsy.

Peel Police have been contacted about the discovery.