2018 Issue №2

The article focuses on determination of the liver volume which is an urgent task for clinical medicine. It is directly connected to the need for an objective quantitative assessment of organ size. The complexity of calculating the volume is due to an irregular geometric shape of the organ, which can not be approximated to an ellipse or any other geometric figure. The aim of the study is to ex vivo evaluate the possibilities of measuring the volume of the liver based on the linear dimensions of the organ according to the formulas proposed for ultrasonic volumetry. The study was carried out on 70 corpses of humans who died of various diseases and examined in the "Bureau of Forensic Medical Examination of the Kaliningrad Region". To measure the liver volume, the most common ultrasound study formulas were used: M. Zoli et al. (1989), D. Glenn et al. (1994), D. Elstein et al. (1997), M. Patlas et al. (2001) and J.T. Childs et al. (2014, 2016). The average weight of the liver according to the results of postmortem weighing of the organ was 1507 ± 500 g, and determined by the method of fluid displacement - 1325 ± 467 cm³. The average volume of the liver, calculated on the linear dimensions of the organ according to the most common formulae, was 1720 ± 687, 1474 ± 639, 1513 ± 516, 1620 ± 702 and 1238 ± 470 cm³, respectively. The authors concluded that the formula given by J.T. Chides and his co-authors is the optimal one for calculating liver volume based on the organ linear dimensions considering the least deviation of the calculation result from the real liver volume.

The article gives morphometric characteristics of thymic mast cells of rats supplied with drinking water for 10 months in a concentration of 10 mg/l in correlation to silicon. It has been shown that the amount of mast cells does not change in interlobular cortical thymus septa with this type of exposure, however, the percentage of mast cells with complete degranulation increases, as well as the proportion of mast cells with a high degree of metachromasia. In this case, the average size of mast cells decreases.