Deep femoral artery branching by MDCT in a Turkish population and its potential clinical implications

The deep femoral artery and its branches are vital for the arterial circulation of the lower ex-tremity. The aim of the current study is to obtain morphometric and morphological data on the deep femoral artery and its branches and to in-vestigate their clinical importance in the Turkish population. Morphometric measurements of the deep femoral artery and femoral artery were per-formed. The diameters of the femoral artery and deep femoral artery were measured in the axial plane. Classification was made according to the size of these diameters. A morphological classifi- cation was obtained by examining the variations of the deep femoral artery branches. The distance from the origin of the deep femo-ral artery to the midpoint of the inguinal ligament was 39.56 & PLUSMN; 8.52 mm, and the distances from the origin of the lateral circumflex femoral artery to the medial circumflex femoral artery were 17.15 & PLUSMN; 4.79 mm and 12.52 & PLUSMN; 4.58 mm, respectively. The study results show that there was a sig-nificant difference between genders in terms of the diameters measured. In the classification made by using the diameters, Type D (39%) had the highest rate, whereas Type C had the lowest rate (7.3%). According to the morphological clas- sification, Type I (52.1%) was the most common in all individuals, and Type V and Type VII (2.3%) were the least common. Our study includes both morphometric and morphological information about the femoral artery and deep femoral ar-tery of the Turkish population. We consider that the current study will be useful for cardiologists, interventional radiologists, orthopedists, and re-gional surgeons in clinical practice.