2.2.2 Tumors

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]this is a short video about tumors and the differences between benign and malignant ones so tumors are just masses of tissue um caused by uncontrolled cell division through mitosis um so we we uh categorize them as either benign or malignant based on what kind of threat they are to like the organism as a whole uh so when we're looking at a person's tumor trying to figure out okay is this something that's going to possibly spread and and and and uh damage other organs is is something that's going to cause uh some sort of dysfunction in that case we consider them malignant we would say that that person has cancer right uh if not then they are considered benign so benign tumors are generally harmless they're not going to spread to other parts of the body they're not cancerous whereas those malignant tumors right they are potentially going to be harmful to the organism um we also like I said call them cancerous uh and the reason for this is because they can invade other tissues they can spread to other parts of the body uh and that process is called metastasis metastasis meta stasis like uh meta kind of means like Beyond or or outside of uh so they can move beyond their normal um place where they they originally derived they originally arose whatever organ or tissue type they originally came from uh and so then they can be present or have um they can Beyond those original confines so in order to determine right we're looking at a tumor like for example with our patient Kai right we're trying to figure out okay does Kai have cancer or not uh then we're going to do a biopsy of one of those uh tumors so he's got these little bumps right that you saw in the MRI butting like his knees right uh we want to know if those are cancerous or not and so we perform a biopsy so a biopsy is where uh you basically take you just literally removing part of a tissue uh that's considered a biopsy so for example I recently had a couple of moles removed uh when they removed them they said we're doing a biopsy that was also Mo removal at the same time but basically they they did that and then they did look at them to make sure that I didn't have like melanoma or something like that which which I didn't it was fine they were benign um but the person who is going to do that is going to be a pathologist pathologist is a medical professional who looks for changes or other signs of disease um to collaborate other Healthcare Providers um are looking at and to help diagnose patients so pathology the study of disease essentially pathology is just study of how um how diseases function how they develop uh you could cut it pathologist might study infectious diseases they might study uh genetic diseases they might study cancer for example right it's type of disease that a pathologist might be interested in uh they might be studying so um the specific type of pathologist which studies diseas is at the cellular level that would do like a biopsy and actually look at the tissues under the microscope we call them a cytopathologist cyto uh when you see cyto that usually refers to cell right so cytoplasm right it's liquid inside of a cell so you know the more you know what these U root words mean the easier it is to decipher and uh understand what the terms actually mean all right so this is a really useful chart I'm not going to go through the entire thing but this is useful and I would recommend having this in your lab Journal so if you want to pause the video right here uh this is also in my pltw you might have already taken these notes if you already went through my pltw and took notes in your lab Journal um but this right here kind of goes through these different characteristics and the differences B Denine and malignant um uh tumors and and what you would see and what you would observe and how you can tell the difference between the two so feel free to pause the video and I'll talk to you guys next time