The gastrointestinal tract

In this introductory video, I'm just going to outline the basic anatomical position of the
gastrointestinal tract. And also outline the function and, therefore, put some of the anatomy into
context. So let's just be clear that the gastrointestinal tract really starts up in your mouth where you
put the food that you're going to eat. So we can see the food passing into the mouth, and then it's
going to pass all the way down through the pharynx before it gets into the abdomen.
So we can actually see part of the gastrointestinal tract in the thorax, and we can do that by
removing some of the lungs-- here and here from the model-- and also removing the heart. And
what you can do when you remove the heart is immediately see lying posterior to the heart we have
the oesophagus. So we just got the heart in position here. We remove it, and we can see the
oesophagus.

So the oesophagus is running directly behind the heart. Therefore, some reflux of acid from the
stomach into the oesophagus can irritate within the heart region of the thorax. That's why we call it
heartburn when you have that oesophageal reflux of acid from the stomach into the oesophagus. So
here we can see the oesophagus. And that passes into the abdomen by going through the
diaphragm. And to see that, we need to remove the liver.

So if we remove the liver here, we can then see the oesophagus passing through the diaphragm
here.
Oesophagus passing through the diaphragm, and we can pick it up as it goes into the stomach.
And we can lift the stomach out and we can have a closer look at it. So here we can see the
oesophagus passing into the stomach.

We can see the stomach's got this nice long curvature here. This is known as the greater curvature. It
also has a shorter curvature here known as the lesser curvature. Now, the stomach is responsible for
mechanically churning the food. So the ingested food is passed down the oesophagus to the
stomach and it contracts, it squeezes, mechanically churns this food. And then it passes it into the
small intestines.
The small intestines, there's three parts of them. The duodenum, then there's the jejunum, and then
there's the ilium. And we can clearly see one of these three parts, the duodenum. The duodenum is
continuous with the stomach, we can see it here. So here's the duodenum. But to see it properly, to
see it's C-shaped course, we need to remove the stomach and then also remove this chunk of
organs, and actually turn it around.
So let's just remember that here's the duodenum, the opening to the duodenum from the stomach,
which we removed. And if we keep hold of it, but turn it around, we can still see we've got the
duodenum here, and we can see that it's a C-shaped tube. C-shaped tube that's sitting around the
pancreas.
If we turn it back around, we can see that the duodenum is then continuous with these coils of small
intestine. And these are your jejunum and the ilium. There's no clear way to differentiate between
jejunum and ilium. It's really a continuous tube that leads to the large intestines. And these coils of
small intestine here can reach sometimes 6 metres in length.
So the small intestines, what's the function? The small intestine is important in absorbing the
nutrients from the ingested food. So it's been mechanically churned by the stomach and then enters
into the duodenum, which is receiving various enzymes from the pancreas, which is helping to now
chemically break down the food.
It then passes into the entire length of the small intestine, the jejunum, ilium, and these nutrients
pass into the veins, which are draining the blood away from the small intestines. And they'll go to
the liver where they can be processed.
So the small intestine is important in absorbing the nutrients of the ingested food. The small
intestines are continuous with the large intestine. And we can see that here if we remove this little
window at the beginning of the large intestine. So here we've got the beginning of the large
intestine, a region known as the caecum. And here we can just about make out the ileocecal
junction, where the distal portion of the small intestine, the ilium, is continuous with the large
intestine.

We can see we've got the caecum. It then ascends upwards to assume this inverted U-shaped path,
but this portion is known as the ascending colon. It then heads towards the liver. Remember, we
removed the liver, which was here. Before it then turns to the left is the transverse colon, and heads
towards the spleen, which we can see here.
Once it gets to the spleen, it then descends down the left portion of the abdomen as it's heading
towards the rectum. So we've got the caecum, ascending colon, transverse colon, the descending
colon. And then to see the sigmoid colon, once again, we need to remove this portion of intestines.
So we hold where the sigmoid colon is here, and if we turn it around, we can see the sigmoid colon--
these bendy parts-- is then continuous here with the rectum. And we can see the rectum here.

The rectum is then going to lead out towards the anus, and that's where your faeces leave the
gastrointestinal tract when you defecate. The faeces that are being prepared for defecation are
stored in the rectum, and also a short way up into the sigmoid colon, where they're formed and
they're ready for defecation. One structure I want to identify whilst I'm holding the organs like this is
this structure here, which is the appendix.

If we just put it back in position for just one moment, we can see that here we've got the cecum that
I identified, and we just hold that region and we turn it around, and we can see that the appendix is
attached to the cecum. What does the appendix do? Well, in humans, not a great deal. It's really a
vestigial product, it's a remnants, it was used in lower order mammals. But in the humans it maybe
has some lymphoidal function; it helps to produce lymph for immune cells.
What's the function of the large intestines? Well, the small intestines have absorbed all the nutrients
out of the body. And what's left, really, are the products of that gastrointestinal tract. They're the
products that are leftover, and they're going to be expelled by defecation, like I said. What happens
to large intestines is they absorb the water, and that creates those hard stools that we defecate, that
we move.
So in this video, we've briefly outlined the basic course and also some key features along the way of
the gastrointestinal tract.

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