Street Anatomy

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.

Have a headache? Try removing the bullet.

[via Daily Mail]

Imagine living with an agonizing headache for most of your life, only to realize that you’ve had a bullet lodged in your brain for 64 years.

This is exactly what happened to a Chinese grandmother, Jin Guangying, who is living headache free for the first time since she was 13, after having a rusty bullet removed from her brain.

In September 1943, Jin was delivering food to her father, a guerilla soldier stationed in a village near her home in Xiny County, China. She was shot in the head, just above her right ear, by the invading Japanese and immediately fell into a coma. The bullet had already passed through a man’s arm, losing enough momentum to remain inside her skull.

“When I woke up, I found I was at home. My mother had taken me back home, applied herbal medicine to my wound and dressed my head in layers of bandages,” said Jin.

Jin recovered in 3 months, but would suffer from relentless headaches for the next six decades.

“When she suffered from the headaches, she would sometimes babble words we could hardly understand, foaming at the mouth, and sometimes she pounded her head with her fist,” said Wang Zhengping, Jin’s daughter.

While the headaches grew worse over the years, her family could not afford to take her to the doctor.

Her family finally had to borrow money for an x-ray that revealed the 3cm long bullet. On May 3, 2007 after a 4 hour operation doctors removed the rusty bullet.

“If the bullet had passed through Jin’s head, she might have died immediately, because usually the wound left by a bullet leaving the human body will be much larger than the one created when it enters, said Zhou Tang, head of surgery at the Renci Hospital of Suyang County.

MRIs: Exposing all our Faults

[via the Chicago Sun-Times]

So you’re thin, feel healthy, try to eat well, and the thought of exercising at least crosses your mind from time to time. Now according to imaging research at the Imperial College in London by Dr. Jimmy Bell, you’re most likely FAT on the inside.

“Some doctors now think that the internal fat surrounding vital organs such as the heart, liver or pancreas – invisible to the naked eye – could be as dangerous as the more obvious external fat that bulges underneath the skin.”

Dr. Bell aims to create “fat maps” to show where people store internal fat. Those of us who are thin but don’t exercise frequently are at the highest risk of having this dangerous internal fat which is linked to high cholesterol, high insulin, high triglycerides, high blood pressure, and other problems.

This body map shows skin in green, muscle in red, and yellow as internal fat.

“Without a clear warning signal, such as a rounder middle, doctors worry that thin people may be lulled into falsely assuming that because they’re not overweight, they’re healthy.”

So isn’t it bad enough that we have to worry about our external fat without having to worry about how much fat is cushioning our organs? What’s most troubling about this is that most people don’t know and will probably never know how much hidden fat they have because the only accurate way to determine it is with an MRI scan. But it is not feasible nor safe to give all of those people MRI scans.

So what can we do to burn off the internal fat? Exercise and improve your diet. But you don’t need an MRI to tell you that.

Read one of the many news articles on this topic via MSNBC