Life and Death of a Kidney
The kidneys ended their lives in this place - a slaughterhouse in Mt. Airy, some 35 miles out of Baltimore. It seems that when it comes to food and health, America acknowledges there might be drawbacks to individualism, and restricts slaughtering to only a few places.
The warm kidney were put on ice and later went on to be soaked with physiological sodium chloride solution (I learned that's the name of plain NaCl solution) to rinse them.
I specifically ordered kidneys for research, not for food. This means they came with all their plumbing still attached.
However, their plumbing was not useful for our research. We need to circulate contrast agent through them, so I worked for most of the day to graft some valves onto them. During this comparatively menial task I learned that kidneys have only three tubes connecting them to the outside world - renal artery, renal vein, and urethra.
Once set up, they were ready to undergo internal rinsing. There is an astounding capability to hold water in those kidneys. I could flush four or five of those syringes into them with nary any visible change. However, it became apparent to the touch that something is accumulating inside.
There are still more to work with.
Each of the kidneys has a different personality, which you learn to appreciate after groping them for the better part of a day.
One of them even conveniently sports some kind of lesion, maybe even a tumor. Which is great for us.
Although not visible on these pictures, they are by now filled to the brim with contrast agent (a suspension of titanium oxide in slightly gelly agar-agar). This is very white, pretty fluid while still in liquid phase, and very prone to find its way out of a pressurized environment, which I learned the hard way. When injecting it into one of the kidneys, the tubing became loose and the pressurized syringe-kidney system exploded in the lab, sending white goo everywhere up the walls and over the table.
This is kind of midway for the kidney phantoms: the CT room at JHMI. They are scanned here so we have something to compare with the later ultrasound images. This comes in a later installment.
The warm kidney were put on ice and later went on to be soaked with physiological sodium chloride solution (I learned that's the name of plain NaCl solution) to rinse them.
I specifically ordered kidneys for research, not for food. This means they came with all their plumbing still attached.
However, their plumbing was not useful for our research. We need to circulate contrast agent through them, so I worked for most of the day to graft some valves onto them. During this comparatively menial task I learned that kidneys have only three tubes connecting them to the outside world - renal artery, renal vein, and urethra.
Once set up, they were ready to undergo internal rinsing. There is an astounding capability to hold water in those kidneys. I could flush four or five of those syringes into them with nary any visible change. However, it became apparent to the touch that something is accumulating inside.
There are still more to work with.
Each of the kidneys has a different personality, which you learn to appreciate after groping them for the better part of a day.
One of them even conveniently sports some kind of lesion, maybe even a tumor. Which is great for us.
Although not visible on these pictures, they are by now filled to the brim with contrast agent (a suspension of titanium oxide in slightly gelly agar-agar). This is very white, pretty fluid while still in liquid phase, and very prone to find its way out of a pressurized environment, which I learned the hard way. When injecting it into one of the kidneys, the tubing became loose and the pressurized syringe-kidney system exploded in the lab, sending white goo everywhere up the walls and over the table.
This is kind of midway for the kidney phantoms: the CT room at JHMI. They are scanned here so we have something to compare with the later ultrasound images. This comes in a later installment.
posted by PJS at
Thursday, December 18, 2008
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