When I saw this on Boing Boing a few days ago, the self appointed experts in the comments there seemed pretty sure that these images were illustrations and not an actual x-rays for various technical reasons that I can't remember. But it had something to do with the way that real x-ray images look.

mebbe they used them thar newfangled scanner things the gubbmint gots at the airports

My Dad broke his rib on their last holiday but one.
He brought the x-ray back (well, why not?)

Mum went round to Grandad's and said, "Do you want to see our holiday pictures?" meaning to produce the x-ray.
Grandad just said, "Not really" which spoiled the joke but made me laugh.

hahahahha
that is funny as heck.

You know what?

It's TOTALLY irresponsible to irradiate people for the hell of it. I'm calling --- whoever it is you call to report gratuitous X-raying....I used to know who that was, too....


dammit!

It's not "for the hell of it" it's for ART! and Naked art at that too!

I fully support it. Then again I'd support setting kittens on fire if it meant more naked chicks.

Don't you also eat puppies, or is that recreational?

Mmmm.......Puppies.:yum:

The garbage disposal in our office kitchen is broken. I wanted to make a sign to put above the sink saying, "Please don't put kittens down the garbage disposal," but I'm new here and I don't know how people would take that.

only one way to find out ...

Zen is right as usual. Stick a cat down the disposal and see what everyone says. Then you'll know if the sign is a good idea or not.

It's just that I've discovered over the years that people don't like to be told what they can or can not do with their kittens.

Every kitten a wanted kitten.
Spay or neuter your pets!

I am not an RT (Brianna is) but I work with PACS (radiology computer systems). I would say that this might be a heavily doctored, and possibly composite, image. When you take a radiographic image of a body region, you generally try to get all the parts as flat as you can--that is, on the same plane*. So that as the radiation passes through the body it is absorbed uniformly, and an "even" amount reaches the receptors that capture data to produce an image. I say "data" and "produce" because digital radiology, which I assume this is, gives us a great leverage in manipulating the data. For instance, fiddling around with this image to produce something that traditional, film-based radiographs could never, EVER produce.

Incidentally, there is great consternation in the industry around the fact that new, younger RTs may never have worked in a world where you had to produce a good, diagnostic radiograph through properly applied technique. Nowadays, you can just "shop" the image when it gets to PACS.

What's the danger in that? Well, the joke goes that the doctor comes in to the exam room, with an x-ray, and tells the patient, "Your arm was broken, but we fixed it in Photoshop." This doesn't happen--but the point is that we may not be getting "true" images.

*There is even a difference between shooting a chest x-ray from front-to-back versus back-to-front.