Word of the Day: Lithopedion

OK, boys and girls, it's time to learn a new word: Lithopedion. Roughly translated from the Greek, lithopedion essentially means "stone child". Apparently, some ectopic or abdominal pregnancies result in fetuses that are too large for the mother's body to reabsorb. Very, very, very rarely, in this cases, the mother's immune system walls off the necrotic fetal tissue by calcification, after which the lithopedion can remain present and undetected for decades. While hacking away at our medical image retrieval program this afternoon, we ran across this radiograph in our collection. Pretty wild, eh? Here's some further reading:

Lithopedion: laparoscopic diagnosis and removal.
Fertil Steril. 2007 May;87(5):1208-9. Epub 2007 Feb 6.
PMID: 17289039

Lithopedion presenting as intra-abdominal abscess and fecal fistula: report of a case and review of the literature.
Am Surg. 2006 Jan;72(1):77-8.
PMID: 16494190

Old abdominal pregnancy presenting as an ovarian neoplasm.
J Korean Med Sci. 2002 Apr;17(2):274-5.
PMID: 11961318

Lithopedion: a case report.
Clin Anat. 2001;14(1):52-4.
PMID: 11135399

For those of you who don't have access to medical libraries, I can pull any of these articles for you if you're interested.