Pathophysiology · Oncology · Week 3

Benign or Malignant: Drag the Behavior Dial

One lump, one dial. Slide it from calm to wild and four things move at once: how fast it doubles, whether it keeps a capsule, how ragged its edge gets, and how odd its cells look. Benign and malignant are not two boxes. They are two ends of this slide.

The lump in the tissue zoom: whole mass

Normal tissue is the pale grid. The mass is drawn from the dial, so its edge and its capsule are built fresh each time you move it.

The same cells under glass zoom: 400x

Same lump, closer in. Watch cell size spread out, nuclei swell and fill the cell, and dividing cells show up.
Set the dialDrag it and every number moves.
calm, walled offwild, invading
Tissue it started in. This picks the name, not the behavior.

Live readout

What a report would call it
Lipoma
Doubling time
280 days
Width now
0.6 cm
Capsule
Thick
Edge
Smooth
Dividing cells
1 per 10 fields
Nucleus share of cell
22 percent
Grade
None
Odds it spreads
0 percent
Drag the dial to begin.

Why the name changes

A calm fat lump is a lipoma. A wild one is a liposarcoma. The ending -oma alone usually means calm, but melanoma and lymphoma break that rule, so the ending is never proof. Cancer from a lining or gland is a carcinoma. Cancer from fat, muscle or bone is a sarcoma.