Why do we still discover new organs in humans when we have high precision imaging devices like MRI and tomography ?
In: Biology
Because “organ” is a very vague term. All organ really refers to is a tissue or group of tissues we’ve identified as “doing something” or “having a purpose”. Combine that vague definition with the following factors, and it becomes very, very easy to just *not notice* an organ is actually an organ, even if we’ve seen it countless times:
– Size. Some organs are *really* tiny, so tiny that you can’t see them even with high resolution scanners. For example, the saliva glands recently discovered in the back of the throat which I suspect may have inspired this post are basically invisible – they’re only a handful of cells each – and we only discovered them because scientists were playing around with a radioactive chemical that happens to emit detectable radiation when it interacts with certain molecules found in those saliva glands. That radioactive emission was picked up by scanners, but they were looking for something completely different, and they found this as a side effect of that search.
– Mistaken identity. It’s pretty common for us to misidentify an organ as being a part of another organ, typically if they’re in very close proximity. Sometimes we end up taking another look and realising it’s a different organ after we learn more about its function.
– Not *looking* for the organ. Even though we cut people open and/or scan them pretty regularly, we only do so because we’re looking for specific things. We’re not just playing around in the blood and guts to see if we can find anything cool. Things can be overlooked because there are much more pressing matters to attend to. For example, you really don’t have time to carefully analyse a bunch of scans and do a bunch of repeat tests on other patients if the reason you took the scan in the first place was to look for a brain tumour.
…like what organ you talking about?
Latest Answers