Abdomen Sonography: Spleen Pathologies and Abnormalities - Video Lesson

Hey everyone, welcome back to our lessons in abdominal ultrasound. In today's lesson, we're going to focus on the spleen. We'll walk through the normal and abnormal sonographic appearance of the spleen, identify both focal and diffuse pathologies, and explore how to correlate clinical history and lab values with what we see on ultrasound. Let's get started. The spleen is an intraperitoneal organ located posterior to the stomach and beneath the left hemidiaphragm. On ultrasound, the normal spleen has a smooth crescent shaped contour with homogeneous medium level echogenicity that is typically slightly more echogenic than the liver and kidney cortex. It is evaluated in long and transverse planes, usually using the left flank or intercostal approach with a curvilinear transducer. Let's begin with splenomegaly, the most common diffuse