[Fixation technique for the tracheo-pulmonary system]

With the conventional immersion fixation, the air remaining in the respiratory tract is an obstacle to the penetration of the fixative. The technique we propose is easily implemented and allows a satisfactory study (in everyday practice) within a relatively short time. The macroscopic and histological examination of the lungs must follow an extremely accurate procedure in order to obtain valuable anatomical documents. These essential data can be usable only if this technique is perfectly reproducible and allows a reliable comparative study between normal and pathological organs. The merits of this technique is that it provides a standard-practice study or, more exactly, that it allows obtaining thin sections of the entire lungs in successive parallel slices, either in the coronal plane or in the sagittal plane. However, the greatest difficulty is to achieve a degree of pulmonary distention that is similar to the situation observed in vivo. The technique we propose is considerably different from those described in the literature (Phat. N. Vuong et al., 1986).