[Postmortem and intravital study of the human heart in prenatal ontogenesis]

The objective of this study was to evaluate the growth of the heart in human fetuses at weeks 18-40 of intrauterine development. The investigation included 2 series of observations: 182 hearts were taken from the fetuses at autopsy, while 58 hearts were studied in living fetuses by ultrasonography of the pregnant women. The following parameters were assessed: heart length and width, atrial and ventricular width, diameter of the aorta. The dimensions of the fetal heart were found to grow in proportion to the gestational age, however the growth of individual heart structures was nonuniform. Both intravital and posthumous investigations have established that in the fetuses of this gestational age the width of the right chambers of the heart prevailed over that of the left chambers.