COR-TECH PR-10 Silicone: Initial Trials in Plastinating Human Tissue.

For our beginning plastination laboratory the attraction for us of COR-TECH PR-10 silicone was its easily availability for U.S.A. customers as it is locally formulated and supplied and, especially, that its claimed ability to impregnate objects could be done at room temperature, rather than at the -25°C required for standard S10 technique. We could find nothing in the published literature about this new silicone. In order to obtain some indication of its utility for a wide selection of tissues, we first plastinated with COR-TECH PR-10 portions of several organs (kidney, pancreas, gall bladder, brain cortex, muscle, and bone) following verbal instructions from the supplier. In a second trial with the same silicone we plastinated a brain stem and heart. With the cautious, slow plastination of our first specimens no detectable shrinkage had been found (linear, measured between two pins). In our second trial, in spite of fast impregnation at maximum vacuum throughout, the brain stem and heart appeared unchanged after plastination, and shrinkage for the brain stem was only on the order of 3%, compared with as high as 10% in the literature on standard technique. The heart demonstrated 1% shrinkage by the same method of measurement. All of the specimens were usable. Discussion compares and contrasts this silicone process with standard S10, and describes pertinent aspects of our procedures, errors and successes. Future plans are noted. Although the described examples are few, we conclude that this new polymer can easily be used at room temperature. It appears to be faster than standard technique, has minimal shrinkage-even for brain tissue, and is worthy of further exploration.