Anatomic Valentines for Your Sweetie

For Valentine's Day, I don't think I can improve on my post from last year.

You should be able to find a "heart" there to suit even the most jaded valentine on your list.

Pareido-Leo

Q. What's the definition of an experimental drug?

A. Anything you inject into a rat that generates a scientific paper.

A zillion years ago, I did my subspecialty training on the very first clinical MR machine on the whole West Coast. Heck, for the best part of a year, we had the only clinical MR machine on the whole West Coast. Having this machine gave us special god-like powers over the researchers at every other med school within 1500 miles. MR was such a hot-button topic in those early days that it was relatively easy to get MR papers through peer-review. It seemed as if one could throw just about any body part into an MR scanner, collect a few similar cases, and some radiology journal somewhere was hungry enough to publish the paper about it.

There was so much competition for this single scanner that each section of the radiology department got 2 scan hours / per week to use for their research. Just 2 hours meant just 2 patient scans, so every readout session became a big deal for us. Our whole section would troupe together down to the MR room twice a week to read out our single MR case for the day.

There was a clear hierarchy for these sessions: the Great Professor would sit in the comfy chair in front, and hold forth on the findings. The lesser professors would sit a bit further back. The fellows, residents, medical students and visiting foreign fellows were spaced around the lightbox according to their station in the food chain. Sometimes the Great Professor would ask a lesser being to describe the findings -- a sphincter-clenching moment for many.


One day we were looking at a pelvic MR image just like the one above, and the Great Professor asked us what we saw. A great peristaltic wave of silent clenching spread through the crowd, because we lesser beings all saw bubkes. We watched with bated breath as the Great Professor continued to gaze at the image, waiting to learn about the subtle finding that we had all missed. Finally, he said, "Looks just like a lion's face.", got up and walked away.

This was not my first experience with radiological pareidolia, but it remains one of the more stressful. In teaching conferences nowadays, I sit in the comfy chair on the front row. It's a dirty job, but I've taken up the torch from the Great Professor and periodically show my residents and fellows cases just like the one above.

Good times.

Radiology Valentines

Regardless of what it personally means to you, Valentine's Day is upon us again. This holiday is celebrated in a special way by those wacky radiologists. Years of training have taught them to spot tiny but clinically relevant details in a sea of noise. However, it has also made them really, really good at spotting completely irrelevant patterns. Just as normal people look for the "Man in the Moon", animal shapes in the clouds or the Virgin Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich, bored radiologists look for these sorts of things in their patients' images.

This pastime of medical pareidolia peaks at certain times of the year, particularly on February 14th and April 1st. A number of examples of this have been published in the American Journal of Roentgenology, not only one of the most respected peer-reviewed radiology journals in the world, but also one of the few with a sense of humor.

A search of the AJR archives and other radiology sites brought up a number of hits for "Valentine". If your sweetie has adventuresome tastes and you still haven't found just the right card, click through the following links for some ideas. There you will find a variety of "hearts" discovered in the midst of other organs, such as a pulmonary bulla, the bladder, Zeus only knows (some part of the gut, I think), the bladder again, the prostate, a cerebral aneurysm, the spine, the stomach, another aneurysm, a Fallopian tube, the spleen, a barium enema of the colon and other sites. One final canonical article on this topic contains no less than 27 examples of other ectopic "hearts" found by its authors.

If your taste turns to somewhat less anatomically explicit valentines, Ironic Sans has some other ideas for your scientific squeeze:

I’ve decided to honor an entirely different group of people with this collection of romantic cards you can e-mail to your loved ones on February 14th, or any other day of the year. It’s Scientist Valentines!

♥ tip for this last quote to Bad Astronomy