Cool Pics on Flickr - From Stanford Medicine

This is not my actual head, although it is someone's actual head. But it's a pretty cool 3D medical image of what my head looks like post surgery (without hair or scalp of course :). I have one of these on each side.

If you see that red artery on the surface of the skull in front of the surgery site, that's a temporal artery (as in temple). There was another one that now goes into the 'spoon slot' in the bone piece that was removed. That's now attached to a major artery in the brain supplying blood from the 'outside' of the skull, as it were.

The three pieces of hardware are called dog bones, for obvious reasons. I have two dog bones and a snowflake. That's how I know this isn't me. :) But seeing this image is a little disturbing since I didn't think my 'spoon slot' was quite so large. Geese, I'm gonna be more careful with pencils behind my ears from now on.

Stanford has uploaded other cool 3D images here. They aren't all head surgeries either. I'm not sure about the top of this person's head. I'd like to think the image just got cut off. :)