Plastination: basic principles and methodology

Plastination is the method of long term preservation of the biological tissues with completely visible surface and high durability.The plastinates are devoid of harmful effects of formalin and they serve as excellent teaching tools in education. Additionally,plastination is an outstanding tool to study cross-sectional anatomy. The three major methods used in plastination are siliconeplastination, sheet plastination with epoxy method and sheet plastination with polyester method. Silicone plastination is the mostversatile technique which can be used for the cadavers, organs, portions and slices. Fresh or formalin-fixed (embalmed) specimens can be plastinated with this technique. More flexible specimens can be obtained if fresh tissues are preferred. Silicone plastination consists of five main steps. These are the preparation of the specimen (dissection and fixation if necessary), dehydration,defatting (degreasing), forced impregnation and curing (hardening). Epoxy plastination preserves 2-5 mm slices of biological tissues by using epoxy resins. In this technique, all tissue fluid and a significant amount of fatty tissue is replaced with a curableepoxy resin mixture. Epoxy plastination method provides precise semi-transparent sectional specimens and in these preparations;gross anatomical structures can be examined with the naked eye in a superb quality down to a sub macroscopic level. Polyesterplastination and classic silicone plastination techniques utilize the similar basic principles. In polyester plastination method, thetissue fluid is removed and is replaced with a curable polyester resin. This method can be used for head brain and body slices