I mentioned previously about the gastrectomy specimen I processed. Now I forgot to take gross pictures before I cut it open. Blogging about what I do isn’t exactly the top priority when I just want to get things over with. But these two shots were taken because I needed to document the depth of invasion. The cream tan part is the tumor.
If you see specs on the specimen that are black, that's either blood clots or poop.
The tumor was located in the pyloroantral area just around 0.5cm away from the distal and proximal margins. When I say margins, just think of the boundaries where the specimens end and proximal is the upper part of the anatomy and distal being the lower part. I took the microscopic pictures for this after signing out. Guess what’s for case 3? No prize yet.
Anyway, the depth of invasion and regional lymph node metastasis is important for staging purposes. We stage to determine the appropriate treatment and other options available for the patient. Sometimes the result of the pathologic staging is a supplementary data compared to the clinical staging as we’re only limited to staging from the data provided by the specimen but that’s another entirely different subject for another time.
On this case, looks like the tumor is grossly invading the muscularis propria into but not through. Microscopic sections did show invasion on the margins so definitely not a good sign.
I thought about adding more hints from the previous case. After some deliberation I decided against it and just leave the rewards to be stacked. Case 3 would likely have a 1 HBD bounty and Case 2 would have a 2 HBD stacked. It’s going to be that way unless someone clears it. This approach makes old post still relevant for the taking and maybe the threshold to do research to crack it will be a “fun” learning experience.
I'm thinking of normalizing activities like these so if anyone wants to do some collab community guessing games that are stem related just give me a ping over discord or shoutout here.
I think I accomplished some of the minor goals like increasing some engagement on my stem account.
If you made it this far reading, thank you for your time.