A radiology resident in Saudi Arabia wasn't sure what to make of a slim metallic object she saw in the chest radiograph of a toddler. But a frontal view on x-ray revealed it to be none other than the cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants, part of a pendant the child had swallowed, according to a report from LiveScience.
The pendant actually belonged to the toddler's sister, said Dr. Ghofran Ageely from King Abdulaziz University Hospital in Jeddah.
"I was amazed by the visible details," Ageely wrote in an email to LiveScience. "You can see his freckles, shoes and fingers ... AMAZING."
Doctors freed the pendant, which was stuck in the boy's esophagus, without any complications.
![Representative example of a 16-year-old male patient with underlying X-linked adrenoleukodystrophy. (A, B) Paired anteroposterior (AP) chest radiograph and dual-energy x-ray absorptiometry (DXA) report shows lumbar spine (L1 through L4) areal bone mineral density (BMD). The DXA report was reformatted for anonymization and improved readability. The patient had low BMD (Z score ≤ −2.0). (C) Model (chest radiography [CXR]–BMD) output shows the predicted raw BMD and Z score in comparison with the DXA reference standard, together with interpretability analyses using Shapley additive explanations (SHAP) and gradient-weighted class activation maps. The patient was classified as having low BMD, consistent with the reference standard. AM = age-matched, DEXA = dual-energy x-ray absorptiometry, RM2 = room 2, SNUH = Seoul National University Hospital, YA = young adult.](https://img.auntminnie.com/mindful/smg/workspaces/default/uploads/2026/04/ai-children-bone-density.0snnf2EJjr.jpg?auto=format%2Ccompress&dpr=2&fit=crop&h=167&q=70&w=250)
