A heart from a sperm whale? We start the car immediately

Not every scanner can accommodate a 50-kilogram heart.

Researchers from the Department of Clinical Medicine and the Department of Forensic Medicine realized this the other day. 

On a cold day in February, the three associate professors Peter Agger, Henrik Lauridsen and Kasper Hansen set course for Ålbæk Bay to take part in the dissection of a dead male sperm whale that had stranded a few days earlier.

First a trip to the hardware store

After the dissection, they drove back toward Aarhus with the enormous heart on a trailer. Along the way they had to stop at Bauhaus to buy pipes so the heart could be filled with preservation fluid. The next stop was Silkeborg, where a private seller on the online marketplace Den Blå Avis had a pallet tank for sale. He looked somewhat surprised when the buyers arrived with a whale heart, which was then loaded into the tank.

At the Department of Clinical Medicine in Skejby, the heart was preserved in the pallet tank and chemically fixed so that it can last indefinitely. The plan is for it to be loaned for exhibition at a natural history museum in Norway in 2027.

Before that, however, it must be examined thoroughly.

Had to borrow another scanner

The researchers aim to map the anatomy of the enormous organ in this mammal, which can dive three kilometres into the depths of the ocean and withstand tremendous pressure. However, the new CT scanner at the Department of Forensic Medicine was too small for the task. Instead, the researchers were given access to a larger scanner in the radiation therapy department at Aarhus University Hospital outside the clinic’s opening hours.

Here they succeeded in creating detailed 3D images of the heart.

The images will now be analysed to provide new knowledge as part of a larger comparative study of mammalian hearts, aimed at helping researchers better understand the heart’s structure and function in extreme environments.

The heart will become part of the Aarhus Heart Archive, one of the world’s largest collections of mammalian hearts, housed in the basement beneath Aarhus University Hospital.

Watch associate professor Henrik Lauridsen explain more in the video below.

Associate Professor Henrik Lauridsen
Aarhus University, Department of Clinical Medicine
Email: henrik@clin.au.dk
Phone: +45 61 72 21 06

Associate Professor Kasper Hansen
Aarhus University, Department of Forensic Medicine
Email: kaha@forens.au.dk
Phone: +45 29 70 25 80

Associate Professor Peter Agger
Aarhus University, Department of Clinical Medicine
Email: peter.agger@clin.au.dk
Phone: +45 26 25 15 15

 

This article has been machine translated