🎓 Brain Tumour: An Overview | Dr. Sourav Chowdhury | Conceptual Surgery

Added: 2026-06-03

[00:00:00]Good evening to everybody. I am Dr. Saurabh Choudhary. I am working as an assistant professor in the department of neurosurgery at Ames Kalyani, West Bengal.

[00:00:08]So, I've been given the topic brain tumor, an overview.

[00:00:13]So, to first start with the definition of uh a brain tumor, that is the growth of abnormal cells in the tissues of the brain. We all know about that they can be either benign or malignant.

[00:00:28]So, needless to mention, World Brain Tumor Day is observed on 8th of June every year. It was started since 2000. It was first observed by German Brain Tumor Association, Deutsche Hirntumorhilfe.

[00:00:42]And it's a non-profit making organization. It raises public awareness and educates people about brain tumor as we are increasingly getting more and more malignant brain tumors.

[00:00:54]So, to start off with, by and large, we get these are the four types of cells that we get in the brain, apart from the neuronal cells. So, the previous ideologies were the neurons is to the glial cells, which form the supportive cells of the brain. They are 1:10. So, the glial cells supersedes the neuronal cells by multiple numbers, you understand? So, now, the present concepts are the glial cells and the neuronal cells are almost same in proportion. So, these are the glial cells that we get in the brain.

[00:01:32]So, the first one is the astrocytes.

[00:01:34]They form They are the major number of cells. They form the scaffolding of the of the around the brain structures. They give a structural support to the neurons. They also form what we call as the blood-brain barrier, the foot processes of the blood-brain barrier that you can see that that are formed by these astrocytes.

[00:01:54]Then we go to the oligodendrocytes.

[00:01:55]These are the uh of what we call as Schwann cells in the peripheral nervous system. So, the central nervous system, they do not have Schwann cells.

[00:02:05]They are lined by oligodendrocytes.

[00:02:09]So, uh furthermore, we have got this microglia. They are the equivalent of uh what we call as the macrophages in the systemic circulation. They act as scavengers.

[00:02:20]And then, we have ependymal cells who lines the ventricles of the brain. The third ventricle, lateral ventricle, fourth ventricle, and the spinal uh central canal of the spinal cord. These are lined by these ependymal cells. So, majority of the tumors that we get in uh brain, they are formed from the glial cells.

[00:02:41]A a lesser numbers are formed by the neuronal neuronal cells.