The corrosion casting technique, known as the best method to study the three dimensional architecture of blood vessels in many organs, applied to the lower gastro intestinal (GI) tract was used to visualize the morphological patterns of small blood vessels supplying the colonic wall at scanning electron microscopy (SEM).
An acrylic low viscosity resin was injected through the abdominal aorta before the origin of celiac trunk once it reached the superior and inferior mesenteric arteries, it filled marginal arteries, submucosal plexus, the perforant capillaries and, at last, revealed the characteristic honeycomb-like shape architecture of mucosal capillary net.
The intrinsic viscosity of the injecting medium allowed a defined three dimensional description of each vascular layer, giving detailed information about their morphological conformation , intervascular distances and peculiar disposition in the space.
All these informations enclosed a specific correlation with the physiological state of the organ, always exposed to the ritmic peristaltic motion and to the high pressure exercitated during the mechanisms of distension and retraction.
For all these reasons it was possible to perform a detailed morfophysiological analisys of vascular tissue, revealing its high specialized patterns that depends mostly on the topographic site and seemed to be strictly connected to the natural duties of the organ itself.