Idk if this is the work of AI, or just a 3D artist who didn’t get very good instructions for their commission.
At first glance: nothing special, just a collection of random instruments; but when you start to dissect it under the lens of a surgical tech (the target audience for this image) it just gets worse and worse.
So let’s dissect it!
First off, that isn’t even a surgical backtable - it appears to be on some kind of supply cart, with a raised lip around the edges, and random rectangular holes for handles that have folded sheet metal along the edge. Technically you could throw an impervious drape of that and it’d be fine, but you generally don’t see surfaces made to support a sterile field with raised edges that go above the field. The folded sheet metal is also a no-no, as the grooves around it collect and breed the hell out of bacteria.
None of it’s draped. There’s that greenish material under the tray and instruments, but stops short of the edges of the cart, so there’s some REALLY high contamination potential going on there. You could get away with a field like that in dental (which is just ‘clean’ vs sterile), but again, this wasn’t sent for a dental tech position.
Instruments from left to right, we’re looking at:
-
a scalpel that’s for some reason separate from all the other sharps in the kidney basin.
-
looks like a tissue forcep - that actually checks out.
-
…the only times I’ve seen a forcep like have been in ortho sets that have a lot of plates and screws - those forceps are to grab the tiny screws from their caddy, cuz they’re hard to get your fingers around, and normal forceps tend to ‘slip’ around the head of the screw and send it flying across the OR.
-
that’s a sponge forcep, but the end is bent in a really odd way; and it doesn’t have a ratchet lock, which isn’t unheard of, but definitely not common for a sponge forcep.
-
Dental explorer, which checks out with the whole not-really-sterile thing; except if it was a dental setup there’d be a lot more dental instruments.
-
Fuck if I know. Doesn’t help that the resolution isn’t great, but the operative ends kind of look flat. Bowel clamps are shaped like that, but that is DEFINITELY not an open-belly setup lol. Also - the ringed end where your fingers would go is closed all the way, but the operational end is still open. If a real instrument looks like that, then it’s damaged as fuck and needs to be thrown away.
-
Either a kocher clamp or straight hemostat - hard to tell w/ shitty res. But they have have the same weirdness with the ratchet being closed w/ operation end still open.
-
That looks like a potts scissor, which is usually for vascular surgery. Handle is janky as fuck though, and it’s doing the opposite weirdness as mentioned before: it’s operative end is closed all the way, but the handles are still a tad open.
-
Mayo scissors, which are a go-to for cutting suture. Only weirdness here is the janky handle style.
…and that kidney basin in the upper right of the tray is just chock-full of WTF. So they’re using it as a sharps container - that’s normal, but they’ve got the scalpels facing one direction and needles facing the other… that’s a good way to get stabbed. ALL of the sharps are resting on the edge, meaning if you bump them just right, they’ll do a flip and launch off… that’s a good way to get stabbed. They’ve got all their sharps in one spot, except for that one random scalpel on the left of the tray. Establishing a sharps zone and then not putting sharps in it… that’s a good way to get stabbed. The scalpels and needles in the kidney basin all have the sharp end stuck into some gauze or something… that’ll dull or bend the super fine end, reducing its effectiveness and generating snag points that’ll cause a bit of unnecessary trauma. Between the three scalpels in the basin and the bonus one floating off to the left, a solid third of the instruments displayed are scalpels lol… are they doing a Wolverine cosplay in the OR?? The blades detach… you only need one scalpel handle - maybe two if you want one ready and on stand by. Also all of them are loaded with what looks like a #24 scalpel blade, which isn’t very common; and is a fucking massive blade… I could see wanting ONE of those for something like an emergency C-section when you need to rip that skin open fucking NOW, but 4 of those monsters set up with an otherwise tiny collection of instruments? lol no. Those two syringes aren’t capped, which is a good way to get stabbed; or labeled, which is a good way mix up your local anesthetic with something that could cause excruciating pain.
…there’s just so much wrong with this image it’s comical. I can’t believe a fucking hospital would choose this over the millions of OR photos already floating around the web lol.
That was a fun rant to type up. If you actually read that wall of text, hope you got a kick out of it lol!
This could be none other than the “brilliant” idea of some recruiter. The same people who, in my field (software engineering), don’t know the difference between Java and JavaScript (two similar sounding yet completely unrelated programming languages) or expect 10 years of experience in a technology that didn’t exist 4 years ago.
They know what a scalpal looks like …sort of. That’s where their medical expertise ends. This particular recruiter sat there looking at their masterpiece, hot off the AI press, feeling very pleased with themselves and their creative genius. Not having a clue that almost everything about the picture is wrong.
I wouldn’t have known that either though so thanks for the really detailed explanation!
The same people who, in my field (software engineering), don’t know the difference between Java and JavaScript
The same people who don’t understand that zip codes are not unique to a country, and do a zip code search on recruiting platforms without also setting a country. And then offer you to move to their country (at your expense) when you explain them the concept of zip codes and countries.
Since you seem to know about this stuff… What’s the deal with kidney-shaped basins in medical settings? Why that shape?
Idk if this is the textbook answer, but what I personally use them for most often is for catching fluids during a washout.
Say your thigh has a nasty infection - like a deep wound, pus all over, tissue is dying, not a good time. So you get sent to the OR, where we’ll irrigate the fuck out of it, trim out all the tissue that looks like it’s dying, then irrigate the fuck out of it again, then irrigate some more. We’re talking like 5 liters of saline being shot into your wound and allowed to just flow right back out. If we let that just hit the floor, we’d be ankle-deep in a coctail of saline, blood, pus, and whatever pathogen is causing the infection, so enter the kidney basin: the curve shape allows it to conform to the curve of your leg, so if I hold that below your wound while the surgeon is blasting it with saline, it’ll catch the mess before it hits the floor. I’ll generally hold with with my fingers wrapped around the bottom of it and thumb around the inside of the basin; that way I shove a suction tube between my thumb and index finger so that the tip of it is resting at the lowest point in the basin. So, as nastiness falls into the basin, it’s immediately sucked up out of our sterile field.
Other than that, I like to put all my fine/sharp instruments in the kidney basin at the end of a case, shove the basin full of sharps into a side of my instrument set, pack the other instruments around it, and send them to our sterilization department like that. That way whoever gets my dirty set in decon can very clearly see where all the sharps are, so they don’t get stabbed when they’re sorting out and wash all the instruments. Some techs will just dump all the dirty shit into the tray with no logic or organization, and it all just looks like a bloody metal birdnest, which is a fucking nightmare to deal with in decon (I used to work in sterile processing, so I know the pain).
I don’t think that’s AI, the tools keep their shape far too well.
Here is what the AI got when I tried to recreate this:
https://i.imgur.com/wvCRtSz.png
See how truly cursed the scissors are? And the cotton balls actually look like cotton balls here.
I’d lean to 3D, especially with the way the chromatic aberration going on there and the clearly defined shapes.
Mirror-scissor that’s triple fingered and then there’s the one fingered scissor
Yeah I also think it’s a 3D render. The chromatic aberration, the shadows, the specular reflection of the metal, the lack of camera sensor noise; something about the lighting just looks off.
It looks way too consistent to be a composite image of some kind.
You’re both completely correct. The biggest tell is probably the fact that the sheet is essentially floating above the tray.
yeah, everything op pointed out are things a person would screw up because they don’t know the tools. I’m also gonna call this non-ai 3d corporate art. the only part of this that feels remotely ai are the cotton swabs, but that could easily just be because it’s hard to make a good 3d cotton swab.
My two favorite medical blunders in TV/movies.
Nasal cannulas. Almost never see them applied correctly.
EMS treating a patient by having them sit on the back of the ambulance.
Have you done a reverse image search? I bet the recruiter didn’t use an ai to make the image but downloaded a random image off google that looked good enough to them and moved on, and that image happened to be AI generated.
