In liver surgery, it’s often important to know the exact layout of the connections the liver has to the rest of the body. Here are some images which hopefully make it clear. The liver is unusual because it has two blood supplies. The first is an an artery, the hepatic artery, which carries oxygen to the liver. The other is the portal vein which carries blood from the guts to the liver and contains the nutrients from food. The portal vein carries 3 times as much blood as the artery and is not to be messed with – 34% of patients with a portal vein injury do not survive.
The other important tube is the bile duct. This drains bile from the liver to the guts. If it gets blocked – by a gallstone or cancer – the patient becomes jaundiced (the skin going yellow).
We use an ultrasound machine to visualise the vessels and the bile duct. It can be tricky and difficult to interpret. The boss has a good technique for getting orientated – the Mickey Mouse sign. When seen in the transverse plane – imagine sitting at the patient’s feet looking up through the body towards the head – the large portal vein with the artery and bile duct in front looks like Mickey. I use this technique every time.
