What should you want to know about the anatomy of an organ (any organ)?
What questions would you like to ask about the anatomy of an organ?
1.What kind of an organ is the organ in question? E.g., what is the lung? What is the heart?
What is the basis (or what are the criteria) for assigning organs to different classes?
2. What does it look like?
How can it be visualized? Rely on ‘methods’ document generated students in class 2.
3. What is its shape?
What kinds of surfaces and other external features (lumps, bumps, borders, ridges, dimples, grooves) does the organ have?
First predict from the canonical shape of the organ the kind of surfaces, borders (margins), and apices you expect the organ to have.
Then retrieve 3D graphical models and correlate anatomical reality with the idealized shape model.
Learn the
specific external anatomy of the organ by generating a mental 3D picture.
5. What is its interior like?
Has it got a cavity and a wall? Partitions (septa, valves)?
Is it filled with material (solid)?
What is the organ made of? What is the material of which it is made?
6. What are its parts?
What kinds of organ parts are do organs have?
Are some parts of the organ also shared with other organs?
What are the unshared parts of the organ?
7. What is the organ a part of?
Which organ system?
Which body
part?
9.What is it connected with (to)?
What is it continuous with? Where?
What enters it? Where?
What leaves (exits) it? Where?
What is attached to it? Where?
10. What organs are adjacent to organ of interest?
11. What supplies it with blood?
12. What drains blood from it?
13. What filters lymph from it?
Subsidiary questions that relate to 11-13:
What is needed for the survival of an organ? Answer: Oxygen and nutrients.
How do oxygen and nutrients get to an organ?
How do waste products (metabolites) and CO2 get transported out of the organ?
How does excess fluid get removed from the organ?
14. What innervates it?
With sensory nerves?
With motor
nerves?
15. How does the organ come to be the way it is? [How does it develop?]
Apart from variation in size, is its anatomy always the same?
What are its anatomical variants?
What are its congenital abnormalities?
All to come
later, but nice to have for comprehensive picture.
16. What does it do? What do we have it for? [What are its functions?]