Renal arterial pattern varieties observed in gross anatomy lab

Abstract

Variations of the renal vascular pattern, like all anatomy variations, are divided into three categories by macro­scopic criteria: morphometric parameters, consistency, and spatial distribution. During a short period of one ac­ademic semester, while completing routine dissections, we found rare varieties in the above-mentioned vessels in 2 out of 13 cadavers. Double renal arteries on the left and earlier point of division of the opposite artery were ob­served in a 70-year-old female cadaver. Five variations in 75-year-old male cadaver were found. One of them was a rare right testicular vein that empties in the right renal vein. The right renal artery was atypical with early branch­ing into its hilar and segmental branches. The left renal artery had three extrahilar branches and one accessory renal artery starting separately inferior to it. Another spatial variation was the nearly horizontal position of the right kidney. The detailed anatomy of this region, including the possible variations, should be considered by clini­cians and especially by surgeons when performing precise invasive and radiological procedures.