Fact Check: Are the demonic MRI images of fetuses real? 

Sonograms of fetuses are often a source of joy for almost every expecting parent, but another variation of these prenatal visualizations could well give them a scare due to their nightmare-inducing abilities.

Perhaps it's for the better that today's imaging practices favor sonograms over magnetic resonance imaging (MRIs), whose results yield 'demonic' looking fetuses.

But are these horrific images of fetuses legitimate or are they simply grossly exaggerated? This fact-check article investigates the credibity of this claim.

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Do fetuses really look like 'nightmare demons' in MRIs?

Last year, a tweet by user @ZiziFothSi featuring four MRI images of fetuses went viral for revealing "the real reason why they discourage MRIs during pregnancy." The hit tweet, which referred to the babies in the entailing images as "nightmare demons," garnered a whopping 446.1k likes and over 65,000 retweets.

On May 12 of this year, another tweet by user @dhomochameleon dug out a few pictures from the original thread once again, captioning it as a 'fun fact of the day.' This tweet instantly went viral too, amassing nearly half a million likes and 61.6k retweets. The internet is clearly having a field day with these images, which are also circulating across other platforms like Reddit forums.

Much to the dismay of the unwitting audience who wasted no time in memeing the MRI scans, these ghoulish images are not a hoax. The original poster even replied to a skeptical commenter who questioned the legitimacy of the pictures, breaking the news that all of them had been sourced from an assortment of medical journals.

Jason Frank, a graduate research assistant and Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin, also vetted the scans to be authentic. Frank, who uses MRI technology to study age-related brain changes, cited similar MRI fetus captures by researchers at Harvard Medical School.

In fact, a closer look revealed that some of the images from the tweet were taken from this very source.

While the creepy fetuses have been likened to the aliens from Mars Attacks several times, their bulging eyes, disturbing brain imaging, and devilish grins are a product of MRI technology. In fact, this spooky effect isn't limited to only fetuses. Adult MRI scans of faces head-on yield similar results.

The procedure's use of magnetic fields and radio waves makes it susceptible to producing more prominent images of organs with high concentrations of water like the brain.

The MRI's “exquisite soft tissue contract” is the reason why the brain and eyes appear particularly bright among the fetuses, and subsequently frightening.

Elaborating on the procedure that governs how MRI scans work, Frank explained:

“In other words, MRI makes it very easy to differentiate between different types of soft tissue found in the body and we are mostly soft tissue. Remember, we are mostly water. One of the primary features of these images are the substantial signal differences between the eyes, brain, nose, and the rest of the face.”

He continued:

“We place a coil of wire around patients as the protons in their body rotate and we use that coil to measure the energy released by the rotating protons as a current. That current is then converted into an image and different tissue types will look differently from one another based on how differently their protons behave (how quickly they lose energy).”

Although the MRI fetus images surely leave a scarring first impression, many deem them more amusing than scary. The fear factor was definitely toned down enough for netizens to have a go at crafting more jokes around them.

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