Street Anatomy

Perfectly Sliced

Transected, originally uploaded by Surfactant.

From the man who brought you the Explosive Hand comes another wincing radiograph of an “Accidental transection of the distal radius and ulna with a sliding miter saw. “

Notice how cleanly cut the radius and ulna are!

Foreign Rectal Bodies: the scientific papers

Unconventional Laboratory Technique, originally uploaded by Surfactant. Graduated cylinder inserted into the rectum.

Listed under Oddee’s 10 Most Bizarre Scientific Papers is a paper on Rectal foreign bodies: case reports and a comprehensive review of the world’s literature.

From the abstract:

The large volume of prior literature on this subject is reviewed, with tabulation of 182 previous cases by type and number of objects recovered and with a discussion of patients’ age distribution, history, complications, and prognosis. Management problems addressed include history, differential diagnosis of reported pruritis ani, and handling of suspected assault. The variety of surgical techniques used to remove rectal foreign bodies transanally or after celiotomy is discussed.

The phenomenon shouldn’t be so surprising. In fact doing a PubMed search of “rectal foreign bodies” comes up with 260 articles and 20 reviews.

Here are some of the more interesting titles for what can be, an embarrassing topic:

• Tube abuse: a rectal foreign body presenting as chest pain.

• Genital foreign bodies: more than the eye can see.

• Rectal impaction following enema with concrete mix.

• A cork in a bottle–a simple technique for removal of a rectal foreign body.

• Rectal salami.

Shaving cream can

Coke bottle

Explosive Hand

Hand trauma, originally uploaded by Surfactant.

“Young male was holding a homemade explosive device. The fuse of the device was lit, and the patient was unable to throw it away before it detonated.”

Powerful image.

A thong, a toe, and a screw…does not always equal a good time

FYI, thongs are flip-flops, it’s an Australian term. Clearly the flip-flop could not be removed for the x-ray. Despite the ouch factor, this is a beautiful x-ray.

Via a great blog called Radiology Picture of the Day

Thanks to Kevin MD for the find.

It’s like a CT scan, but for an individual cell!

a. A 3D rendered image of a HeLa cell. The outermost layer of the upper hemisphere of the cell is omitted to visualize the inner structure. Nucleoli are colored green and parts of cytoplasm with refractive index higher than 1.36 are colored red.

b. Top view of a.

[via China View]

BEIJING, Aug. 14 (Xinhuanet) — An imaging technique that could set a new standard in dozens of fields from immunology to neurology allows scientists to scan a living cell and render it as a 3-D image in a process similar to CT scanning now used in health care.

“Accomplishing this has been my dream and a goal of our laboratory for several years,” Michael Feld, director of MIT’s Spectroscopy Laboratory, told LiveScience.

Until now, techniques for rendering cells in 3-D required the application of chemicals and stains, freezing and other invasive processes. These techniques interfere with normal cellular function to varying degrees, but that has not stopped their widespread use.

The new technology can be used on live cells in their native state, with no preparation.
Developing this process required that the scientists look to other fields that depend heavily on 3-D imaging techniques such as paleontology where CT scans are used to study fragile bones.

The scan collects several narrow X-ray cross sections, or slices, of a 3-D object. The cross sections depict the density highs and lows of one thin section. Many slices are collected from several different orientations and then stitched together into a contiguous solid, much like making a loaf of bread out of individual slices.

The MIT researchers used visible light instead of X-rays, but had to compensate for the fact that cells absorb very little light. To compose the images, they had to measure how much the light waves passing through the cell slowed, a property known as refractive index.

After taking 100 slices measuring the cell’s refractive index, the researchers composed a 3-D map that detailed the cell’s many parts, from membrane to mitochondria.

“This will open up the possibility of imaging through tissues, which will have a significant impact on life science,” said Wonshik Choi, first author of the study describing the technique. The study is published in the Aug. 12 online edition of Nature Methods.