Spleen

A large vascular lymphatic organ lying in the upper part of the abdominal cavity on the left side between the stomach and diaphragm composed of white and red pulp which acts as a blood forming product early in life and later a storage organ and filter of red corpuscles and platelets

Splenectomy

The spleen is located in the top left portion of your abdomen. Operations on the spleen require a very careful dissection around a portion of the stomach, a portion of the pancreas, a portion of the colon as well as the edge of one of the kidneys. A large portion of the operation involves a dissection just above the pancreas. This image demonstrates the first stages of identifying the artery and the vein to the spleen. The blue vessel between the jaws of the dissector is the splenic vein, the yellow tan tissue at the bottom left of the picture is the pancreas.