Microvasculature of the human fetal extra-ocular muscles. A SEM corrosion casts.

In the light of already known differences on the vascular patterns between slow and fast contracing skeletal and extra-ocular muscles (EOM) which has been described in both mammals and man we were interested to see if same of these features are presented in the human EOM during the second half of the gestation. Therefore the microvasculature bed of EOM was studied by SEM of vascular corrosion casting technique. 15 human embryos at 16-20 week of gestation, after spontaneous abortion, were used for this study. The vasculature bed of the all EOM studied is composed of two layers i.e. the orbital and the global. The orbital layer, in all specimens examined, has shown a relatively higher number of transverse anastomoses than the global one, although the capillary vessels were arranged similarly on the both sides.