Okay, so moving on to section five where we're just going to talk about a couple of different terms, all that relate to anastomosis. And anastomosis are really just connections, describing connections between blood vessels. So if we're talking about blood vessels forming special interconnections, these in general are called vascular anastomosis. So most of the organs are going to receive blood from more than one artery.
And arteries supplying the same territory are going to merge and they're going to form the arterial anastomosis. Arterial anastomosis are really great because they provide an alternate pathway. And these alternate pathways are called collateral channels.
And if something happens to one of the pathways that we have, like say, for example, we have a cut in one of the arteries or we have a clot, then we have the collateral channel that can help. come in and provide sufficient blood to that tissue area. If we're talking about where we're going to have these arterial anastomosis, they're really common in joints, where if we're actively using a joint, say in our fingers or our knee, if we're actively using it, that could actually hinder the amount of blood flow through one channel, but then we have these collateral channels that can continue to supply the blood flow if needed.
We also have a lot of the arterial anastomosis in our abdominal organs, brain, and heart, but we don't really have any to our retina, our kidneys, and our spleen. The third type of anastomosis for the definition that I want you to understand is arteriovenous anastomosis. And these are shunts in the capillaries themselves.
So we already talked about one. through the capillary bed. So in case we don't want to feed the entire capillary bed, we can use this anastomosis to kind of quickly get the blood from our artery to our venule. And then we also have venous anastomosis, and these are pretty common. They're really, really abundant that occluded veins rarely block backflow.
So we have all of these different routes that we can take in places. we're likely going to be blocking blood flow due to movement or constriction of, say, our arm or our muscle or something like that.