An ultrastructural morphometric study of the papillary muscle of the right ventricle of the cat.

The papillary muscle of the cat heart's right ventricle has not been studied previously with quantitative ultrastructural techniques despite its wide use for functional studies. This tissue was perfusion-fixed, processed for electron microscopy, and morphometric techniques were used to assess the ultrastructural characteristics of the papillary muscle as well as the working myocardial cells. The results of this study were that 73.5% of the papillary muscle was composed of muscle cells, 9.7% of blood vessels, and the remainder of interstitial connective tissue. In the muscle cell the volume fraction of mitochondria was 17.3%, that of myofibrils was 49.8%, and that of the nucleus was 2.0%. The mitochondria to myofibrils ratio was 0.36 and the surface to volume ratio was 0.309. In a quantitative ultrastructural comparison of perfusion and immersion fixed tissue it was found that significant differences in the volume density of the blood vessel lumen existed between the two groups. In addition, there were significant differences in the volume fraction of mitochondria and nucleus between perfusion-fixed and immersion-fixed muscle cells. A concurrent significant decrease between the two groups was also found for the ratio of mitochondria to myofibrils. The perfusion-fixed tissue can be considered to provide only normal baseline data for the papillary muscle of the right ventricle. These data are important as they can be used in future structure-function studies on normal and pathological heart tissue.