Dissecting Brains

I feel terribly privileged when I'm handling human brains these this tissue is something requested to us for research purposes and it's an honor to be able to handle the tissue and meet that request my name's steve gentleman i'm the professor of new pathology and Imperial College in London and one of my job's is to carry out the diagnostic assessment of the brains that come into our tissue bank the first thing you do when you get the brain is to examine the external features of the brain to see if there's any clue there as to what might have gone on so you look at the surface of the brain the membranes that cover the brain is there any evidence of any infection we then look at the patent on the surface of the brain at the folding to see if that's normal and whether there's any shrinkage or atrophy in any particular areas also feel the brain to see if there's any softening because if there is a soft area that may indicate there was a stroke in that area then look at the blood vessels at the base of the brain and they will give us some clues as to lifestyle factors that may have been involved they may be atherosclerosis or hardening of the arteries due to a high-fat diet or smoking or lack of exercise all may contribute to this type of change when we have a whole brain fixed in formalin what we will do is we will make a cut through the brain stem which is that part of the brain which is quite small but very important in carrying out all of those everyday functions that we will rely on without thinking about too much we separate the brain stem and the cerebellum from the rest of the brain in order to carry up the neuro pathological examination in a reproducible fashion we have to cut up the brain in a fairly stereotypical way so we use a single point for our first cut we have a landmark called the mammillary body that's a part of the brain involved in housekeeping functions and we use that as our guide for the first cut using a rather large bread knife if you like that's what it looks like we then slice the brain up into what we call coronal sections and then space those out so that we can have a look through the whole extent of the brain to look for any pathology and then to take some representative blocks so that we can follow up and look down the microscope at what's going on and in this way we can build up a diagnostic report of what the problem was with that particular patient and this is very important because the tissue then goes out to researchers and they no need to know exactly what was going on we cut these sections using a guide because there are some parts of the brain that we need to look at which are quite small so we have to accurately make a half centimeter slice when all these slices are laid out in a logical fashion you can inspect each slice individually working from the front to the back of the brain just checking that all the structures are as you would expect them to be looking for any signs of change whether it be in multiple sclerosis for example there may be changes in the color of parts of the brain we then have to sample 20 specific anatomical areas to allow us to take them away to be stained and look at them down the microscope to try and work out which pathologies are there because it's not always just one pathology we have to make sure if there are multiple authorities that we write that down and again it's very important for the researcher they need to know everything that's gone on in the brain the samples we take are put into small plastic cassettes and these are then embedded in paraffin wax and the reason we do this is to get very very thin slices to look at under the microscope we need to mount the tissue in something that can be cut so those are cut at about 6 microns which is very very thin it allows us to look at the tissue I've been looking at brains for 25 years now and I have probably examined over a thousand every brain is individual when I first pick up the brain what I'm looking at is the external features and if you like the convolutions of the brain are a little bit like a fingerprint they're unique to the individual obviously they have a very similar general structure but there are subtleties we're all slightly different in our development so no two brains are the same and indeed that applies to the pathology as well Parkinson's disease is very well described disease when in fact the pathology you see in the brains of people who've had Parkinson's disease it's very individual [Music] you

Channel: Wellcome Collection

Views: 6,859,337

Rating: 4.8697944 out of 5

Keywords: brains, brain bank, dissection, cut up, tissue bank, imperial college, multiple sclerosis, parkinsons, neuropathology, neuroscience, anatomy, body, brain, slice, the brain, human brain, laboratory, tissue, london, human body, donation, donor, stem, nervous system, cerebellum, patient, anatomical, pathology, sample, parkinsons disease

Id: OMqWRlxo1oQ

Length: 7min 7sec (427 seconds)

Published: Thu May 10 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/andre2142]

Interesting watch, thanks!