Three thin tubes came out of one man's abdomen, each draining bile from a different section of his liver. The bile in the first bag was dark. The second was lighter. The third lighter still. Surgeons at the Medical University of Graz in Austria recognized that the gradient was no coincidence, and that it lined up with which parts of the liver had lost their arterial blood supply during a gallbladder operation at another hospital.
They gave the finding a name: the biliary sunrise. Their case report appears in the World Journal of Gastroenterology and describes something surgeons rarely get to observe in real time. Liver ischemia, meaning tissue starved of blood, is normally invisible without imaging or a biopsy. Here it announced itself in three plastic bags at the bedside.
