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The renal medulla (Latin: medulla renis 'marrow of the kidney') is the innermost part of the kidney. The renal medulla is split up into a number of sections, known as the renal pyramids. Blood enters into the kidney via the renal artery, which then splits up to form the segmental arteries which then branch to form interlobar arteries.
Download as PDF; Printable version; In other projects ... This article incorporates text in the public domain from the 20th edition of Gray's Anatomy (1918 ...
The venous drainage of the kidney large mirrors its arterial supply, except that there are no segmental veins. [4] The stellate veins arise from the capillaries, then drain successively through interlobular veins and interlobar veins until these converge from across the kidney to form the renal vein for that kidney.
[2] [3] They are located on the left and right in the retroperitoneal space, and in adult humans are about 12 centimetres (4 + 1 ⁄ 2 inches) in length. [4] [5] They receive blood from the paired renal arteries; blood exits into the paired renal veins. Each kidney is attached to a ureter, a tube that carries excreted urine to the bladder.
The renal cortex is the outer portion of the kidney between the renal capsule and the renal medulla. [1] In the adult, it forms a continuous smooth outer zone with a number of projections (cortical columns) that extend down between the pyramids.
The nephron is the functional unit of the kidney. [3] This means that each separate nephron is where the main work of the kidney is performed. A nephron is made of two parts: a renal corpuscle, which is the initial filtering component, and; a renal tubule that processes and carries away the filtered fluid. [4]: 1024
[citation needed] A large "staghorn" kidney stone may block all or part of the renal pelvis. The size of the renal pelvis plays a major role in the grading of hydronephrosis. Normally, the anteroposterior diameter of the renal pelvis is less than 4 mm in fetuses up to 32 weeks of gestational age and 7 mm afterwards. [2]
The simplest type of kidney in mammals is the unipapillary kidney, consisting of a cortex, medulla, and renal pelvis. [163] But the unipapillary kidney is limited by the number of nephrons at which it functions optimally. [20] It is assumed that unipapillary kidney was the original kidney structure in mammals, from which multilobar kidneys ...