Best medical science images of 2015

Snapped by photographer Michael Frank in collaboration withNick Short of the Royal Veterinary College in London, this image shows theuterus of a New Forest pony preserved in formalinand kept in a Perspex container, complete with foetus at about five months intoits 11-month gestational period, currently housed at the college's LanyonAnatomy Museum. The membranes and umbilical cord still attach the foetus to thewomb, which has been cut open to display the rich blood supply on the interior.

"As far as standout images go, the image of the horse'suterus with the foetus still inside was incredible and just sticks in my mind.It evokes many different emotions at once. It's fascinating, sad, macabre,almost brutal. Yet the subject is also delicate, detailed and beautiful,"said Wellcome Image Awards judge James Cutmore, picture editor of BBC Focusmagazine. "The image shows us a large and magnificent creature reduced tothis sad, fragile and half-formed creation, which I findvery humbling."

Click through the rest of the gallery for ourfavourite Wellcome 2015 Image Award winners, and visit the website for thefull set.

Michael Frank's collaboration with London's Royal VeterinaryCollege saw several formalin-preserved specimens immortalised as stunningimages. This image shows the reticulum -- the first of four chambers in thealimentary canal that make up the stomach of a ruminant animal -- in this case,a goat.

This chamber is also known colloquially as the"honeycomb" due to the shape of the internal mucosa; this part of thereticulum may be separated and eaten as tripe, but in its actualfunction, it is home to the stomach bacteria that help break down the animal'sfood.

A tale of two cells. On the right is a normal cell. On theleft, latched to it, is what is known as a natural killer cell. These are thesoldiers of the immune system, seeking out infected or cancerous cells andattacking them in order to keep the body healthy. This image, captured bybiochemist Nele Dieckmann and microscopy specialist Nicola Lawrence, has caughtthis process in action.

The NK cell has attached itself to the normalcell and is scanning it for signs of disease, changes in the cell caused byinfection, stress or malignancy -- and preparing to release chemicals -- thebright red dots -- that will cause the normal cell to self-destruct if it doesturn out to be diseased.

Prolific science illustrator Maurizio De Angelis is behindthis compelling illustration of the release of Asteraceae pollen spores -- thefamily of flowering plants to which daisies, asters and sunflowers belong. Themicroscopic spores are usually released in the spring and are a common allergen. However, they're also an integralpart of the way plants reproduce.

The pollen on a flower's stamen contains the male spermcells of the plant, which need to be transferred to the female reproductivestructure -- the pistil -- in order to create a seed. This is primarilyachieved through transport via insects such as bees and butterflies, birds andthe wind.

They look just like lizards, but the tuatara of New Zealand aresomething very special indeed -- the last surviving members of a family ofreptiles that used to live with the dinosaurs. Although they live only in NewZealand now, 245 million years ago, tuatara populated the world.

The two remaining tuatara species -- named fortheir spiny crest, "tuatara" is a Maori word meaning "spinyback" -- have changed quite a bit from their prehistoric ancestors, whichmakes them a valuable study in evolution. This micro-computed tomography imageshows the skull and front limbs of the tuatara, allowing a close study of the tinybones within its tendons, usually hard to find in dissection; examining theseand how they have changed will allow researchers to understand how these bonesaffect the tuatara's movement.

This is not a painting; in fact, if we were looking at thisimage at 1:1 scale, it would measure just 15 micrometers (0.015 millimetres)across. It's a digital colour-coded map of the nervous system of a fruit fly.The neurons that can sense vibrations are coloured yellow, while the blue andred circles represent information entering and leaving the synapsesrespectively. The orange circles represent mitochondria.

The image was created by taking electron miscroscopy imagesof very thin slices of the fly's tissue, which were then reconstructed to makea 3D model.

After decades of service at the Trinity College, Dublin,this anatomical model on its way to the skip got a last hurrah from artist andphotographer Anthony Edwards.

Awards judge and science broadcaster Adam Rutherfordexplained, "The model, the photo and the story are all beautiful. Thesemodels are the next best thing to actual bodies for learning anatomy, and havea kind of beauty about them. The fact that it was retrieved from a dump atTrinity makes its story tragic and we felt, like the photographer, that itsservice and beauty were worth honouring."

Confocal micography on a 0.75-millimetre thick slice of mousebrain here reveals the structures inside. The colour codes, created withchemicals to make the structures more visible, paint the closest nerve cells asreds and oranges, with the farthest as blues and greens. This technique isbeing used to map the wiring of entire brains.

"The beautiful colours and incredible levelof detail in this image drew us in, inviting us to look more and more closelyat it. The fine lines showing the nerve fibres 'shooting' across this tinyslice of brain also give it a feeling of movement and complex activity,"awards judge and head of Wellcome Images Catherine Dracott said.

Cat owners know that sandpapery feeling when a cat decidesyou need a bit of a wash. This polarised light micrograph of a three-millimetrewide cross-section of cat's tongue shows the rough structure that creates thatsandpapery feeling; although not as pleasant on skin, for a cat's fur, thestructures act like a sort of comb, cleaning the fur and "brushing"it neatly into place.

This picture was taken from a very old slide, prepared inthe Victorian era, using a technique that is well known now, but that was verynew at the time. Black dyes were injected into the capillaries to make themmore visible.

Parasitoid wasps are some of the most skin-crawly creaturesin the insect kingdom. These wasps lay their eggs inside other insects; whenthe eggs hatch, they eat their way out of the still-living host from the inside.Blurgh. Although it may give you the willies, parasitoid wasps often preyon agricultural pests -- making them a highly effective natural pesticide.

This light micrograph shows a species recentlydiscovered in the rainforests of Borneo -- a single female specimen mixed inwith thousands of other insects. It measures just 0.75 millimetres in length;this photograph shows in detail the wasp's unusual legs, wings and antennae.

Visit the Wellcome Trust website for the rest of the award winners, and let us know your favourite on Twitter or Facebook.