Blood Supply – Overview of Arterial Supply to Lower Limb

00:01 In this lecture, we’re going to have an overview of the blood supply to the lower limb.

00:08 We’re going to look at the femoral artery and some important branches, the profunda femoris. We’re going to look at the obturator artery and some gluteal arteries: superior and inferior. We’ll then look at the popliteal artery and its blood supply to the knee.

00:24 We’ll look at the tibial artery supplying the leg, and the plantar arteries and dorsalis pedis that supplies the foot. Here, we can see the general scheme of the blood supply to the lower limb. We can see here on the slide, we have the anterior surface of the right lower limb, and we have the posterior surface here. We can see the femoral artery giving rise to the deep artery of the thigh or the profunda femoris before entering the adductor canal to go and supply the popliteal region and the leg. As it’s coming out of the adductor canal, it’s known as the popliteal artery running posterior to the knee joint. And then we have the tibial artery and the anterior and posterior tibial arteries that supply the various compartments of the leg. The anterior tibial artery, we can see here, passes through the superior aperture of the interosseous membrane to supply the anterior compartment and then the dorsum of the foot. The posterior tibial artery supplies the posterior compartment.

01:26 It gives rise to the fibular artery which supplies the fibula with the lateral compartment and then supplies the sole of the foot. So the femoral artery is the direct continuation of the external iliac as it passes deep to the inguinal ligament passing through the retro-inguinal space. As the femoral artery passes distally, it changes its name to reflect its new location. So it is one long artery, just like the subclavian, the axillary, and the brachial in the upper limb. So we have femoral, popliteal, tibial. A couple of exceptions to the blood supply to the lower limb, in that the gluteal region is supplied by gluteal arteries, and these are branches from the internal iliac artery. And there may be important anastomosis between the gluteal arteries and the femoral artery, and we can talk about those. The medial thigh is supplied by the obturator artery. And this again is a branch of the internal iliac. It enters the medial thigh by passing through the obturator foramen.