How a Huge Blood Clot Took the Shape of a Lung Passage – The Atlantic

Somehow, a man coughed up an intact blood clot shaped like a lung passage.

Source: How a Huge Blood Clot Took the Shape of a Lung Passage – The Atlantic

On Tuesday, The New England Journal of Medicine tweeted the most recent addition to its photo series of the most visually arresting medical anomalies. The image is of a mysterious, branchlike structure that, posted elsewhere, would probably pass for a cherry-red chunk of some underground root system or a piece of bright reef coral. But this is no creature of the deep. It’s a completely intact, six-inch-wide clot of human blood in the exact shape of the right bronchial tree, one of the two key tubular networks that ferry air to and from the lungs. And it was coughed up in one piece.