Looks to me as if there wasn't much left to recover.
Looks to me as if there wasn't much left to recover.
Got a picture of this guys brain?
again, I guess them's good grounds fer a killin'!
How come the sinuses show in the second scan but not the first? Could be comparing apples and oranges?
The picture on the left may be a normal brain scan, but the picture on the right is a postmortem. Being mistreated for a decade and then deliberately dehydrated to death can cause extensive brain damage. There certainly may not have been "much to recover" after her death, but the state of her mental capacity prior to her murder can no longer be determined.
Do you have the third brain scan of Terri's? The one that shows what it looked like after she was starved/dehydrated to death?
And embyros of microgram weight grow to 100 kilograms full adult. Impossible, you'd say, if you'd be less faithful that wonderous logic of death that has taken you in.
Looks to me as if there wasn't much left to recover.
As a radiologist, the first time I saw those those two CT images used to make that point, I thought to myself, "Now there's a classic example of how the media can and will manipulate information."
The CT slice selected to illustrate "the normal brain" has been taken at the axial level of the frontal horns and the third ventricle.
The CT slice selected to illustrate "Schiavo's brain" was taken at the axial level of the lateral ventricles.
The ventricles are cerebral spinal fluid (CSF) filled cavities in your brain. (In purple in the drawing below.) They are supposed to be there. On CT, CSF is black.
The lateral ventricles are the very long, curved ventricles at the top of the ventricular system. The third ventricle is the little ventricle below the lateral ventricles. The frontal horns are the anterior tips of the lateral ventricles that are seen as little pockets of CSF when you clip them with a third ventricle level CT slice.
So, if you take the CT slice at the third ventricle/ frontal horn level, guess what? There are almost no CSF collections there.
But, when you take a CT slice at the level of the lateral ventricles.....WHOAAA!!!.....Big difference! These are mildly dilated lateral ventricles in a 76 year old.
To a layman, especially if they are shown a slice at the third ventricle level as an example of "what a normal brain should look like", the CT slice selected from the lateral ventricle level makes it look as if there were a huge hole in Granny's brain.
No need to try to euthanize Granny because of those lateral ventricles. She will just hit you over the head with her purse and tell you that she is cutting you out of her will as soon as she calls her lawyer in the morning.
There is no doubt the Schiavo had hydrocephalus (and cortical atrophy too) but I have had patients with just as much hydrocephalus with shunts in place walk in and walk out of our CT room.
Schiavo may have had other issues that would have made her a lost cause but, if I showed a layman third ventricle level CT images of a "normal brain" and then showed the layman lateral ventricle level images of any of your brains, I could very easily convince that layman that a significant chunk of your brain was gone.
But it was fine for the state to finish the job for him after it looked like the one on the right.