New approach to vascular injection in fresh cadaver dissection

Vascular injection techniques for anatomic studies are often complementary. Use of colored gelatinous mixtures with methylene blue provides precious data about descriptive anatomy by the contrast that it produces in the tissues. The introduction of radiopaque medium, such as lead oxide, into the gelatinous mixture can be used as a complement by means of x-ray examination, in order to facilitate and to reduce the time of investigation. Addition of rhodamine B to the radiopaque mixture keeps the advantages of the contrast medium, but also permits further dissection to demonstrate some details shown by prior x-ray examination. This article compares these different injection techniques in the study of the nasal vascular network. Moreover, it depicts a new injection approach that allows the investigation of vascular territories depending on thin caliber arteries by selective reinjection, defining microangiosomes. Each above-cited technique was used in ten facial territories of fresh cadavers. The patterns of the vessels shown by these techniques were identical, with a constant visualization of infra-millimetric arteries. However, selective reinjection was the only method that permitted characterization of the proper vascular territory of the lateral nasal artery.