Video: Vesicouterine pouch

Hi everyone! This is Nicole from Kenhub, and in this tutorial, we will be talking about one of the anatomical spaces located in the female pelvis – the vesicouterine pouch – and we're going to have a little look at its location and how it is formed.

So here we are looking at a sagittal plane view of the pelvic area of a female and the vesicouterine pouch shown in green is an anatomical space situated between the uterus here and the urinary bladder which is just here, and it's these structures that give the vesicouterine pouch its name. And note that the vesicouterine pouch is, of course, only found in the female pelvis since it requires the presence of a uterus.

So let's talk about how the vesicouterine pouch is formed. Now as we can see in this slide, the urinary bladder and the uterus are infraperitoneal organs meaning that they lie inferior to the peritoneum shown beautifully here in this slide in green. And as we can see, the peritoneum extends over much of the superior surface of the urinary bladder which is just here but nearing the posterior surface of the bladder, the peritoneum reflects suddenly onto the anterior surface of the uterus thereby forming a deep narrow recess between the urinary bladder and the uterus which is continuous with the peritoneal cavity.

So in this image, it kind of looks like the uterus and the bladder are just adjacent to one another but you just have to imagine that there's a little fold that's created by the peritoneum, and that fold or recess is the vesicouterine pouch.

Now due to the anteverted or forward bending position of the uterus, its anterior surface is more closely related to the posterior superior surface of the urinary bladder than it is with the anterior surface of the rectum which lies here posteriorly where my arrow is pointing. And so it's for this reason that the vesicouterine pouch is much more narrow than the posteriorly situated space between the uterus and the rectum which is known as the rectouterine pouch shown here.

Now for comparison, in the male pelvic cavity, the vesicouterine pouch and the rectouterine pouch are obviously both absent but in their place lies a different space called the rectovesical pouch between the urinary bladder and the rectum, and this is also lined by peritoneum.

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