okay so this is a t tutorial on um anatomical terms and it's a basic tutorial um which would should hopefully help you to understand how different terms are used in anatomy to describe the relative positions of different structures in the body so firstly I'm going to talk about the anatomical position this uh model here is standing in the anatomical position so you can see he is standing facing forward with his face looking towards you his palms are facing outwards and his forearms are supinated and his feet are facing forward like that so this is the anatomical position um if I was just zoom in a bit on his head technically speaking in the anatomical position the inferior uh margin of the orbit should be level with the top of the external AIT Tre meatus so that's just a technical detail but when you describe anatomical structures you talk about them um with reference to this anatomical position so the little finger is medial to the thumb so you can imagine if if the even if the hand's facing the other way if a patient's lying on the bed Upside Down Standing on the head whatever you're always talking about structures relative to the anatomical position so firstly I'm just going to talk a little bit about anatomical planes because people tend to talk about them um so there three um major groups of planes in the human body uh the sagittal plane the coronal plane and the axial plane um or uh transverse plane transverse horizontal axial are used interchangeably so the sagittal plane is a plane that divides um the body into left and right tves um and it's run it runs straight down the middle here um the coronal plane is oriented vertically and divides the body into anterior and posterior halves and it runs perpendicular to the sagittal plane so it runs down here and then the horizontal transverse actual whatever you want to call it plane um runs as you could probably guess horizontally and it divides the body into Superior and inferior Parts just going back to the sagittal plane um the plane that divides the body exactly equally into right and left halves is known as the medial median sagittal plane so when you learn about Anatomy or you're reading textbooks or watching these tutorials you'll hear a lot of of terms that are thrown about to help describe um the relative locations of structures within the body like anterior posterior superficial deep proximal distal Superior inferior rostral cordal dorsal vental all these kind of words so I'll just run through um what these mean and I'll show you a few examples so hopefully you can remember what these will mean in the future so anterior and posterior anterior uh means closer to the front of the body and all these terms are relative to anatomical position so anterior and posterior describe structures relative to the front and the back of the body so for example um the sternum is anterior to the heart so I'll just show you that so the sternum here zoom in a bit is an to the lungs it's anterior to the heart anterior to the vertebra or you could say the vertebra is posterior to the sternum whatever you whatever you like so anterior and posterior refer to the front and the back of the body median and lateral means close to the so Med medial is close to the midline lateral is further away from the midline so a medial structure is a structure that's closer to that median sagittal plane that I talked about a bit before so for instance going back to the sternum don't know why I'm choosing the sternum but the sternum is median medial to the humus there the sternum is medial to the the rib the ribs so medial and natural just refer to either closer or further away to to the midline and just going back to um the importance of the anatomical position um we would say that the little finger is medial to the thumb because in the anatomical position the little finger is close to the midline obviously you can see that if if this model was uh to turn his palm so they're facing away from you um then the thumb would be close to the midline but we'd still say that the thumb is a lateral structure relative to the little finger because in the anatomical position uh that's how how it is so always describe things relative to the anatomical position Superior and inferior describe things on the vertical axis so a superior structure is one that's close to the top and an inferior structure is one that that's close to the bottom so we could say that the nose is superior to the chest the nose is superior to the knees the knees is superior to the feet so that's what Superior and inferior mean another um term that's used quite a lot is superficial and deep uh superficial just means close to the surface of the body and deep means further away from the surface of the body so if I just move I'm just going to move the slider on the left which is slight off screen at the moment and it will move gradually from superficial to deep structures so going down to the muscle lay down to the bones and then you can see the organs and we're moving everything going from superficial to deep and then back to so where this might be a bit confusing is um if you're describing structures on the back so the skin here is superficial but it's posterior so a muscle of the back here if you looking at the muscles of the back the ltis latissimus dorsy is a posterior structure but it is more superficial than um these structures that lie underneath it so the sorus posterior inferior is deep to the latissimus dorsy but it's more anterior than the latissimus dorsy because relative to the anatomical position it's close to the front of the body so superficial and deeper just used to describe um things that are close to the surface of the body or further away from the surface of the body so the heart is deep to the skin the words proximal and distal are also commonly used especially when talking about the limbs and the digestive tract or or anything well a lot of things really but um proximal means closer to the trunk or closer to the structure's origin and distal means further away from the structure's origin so if I if we're just talking about muscles for instance um the proximal attachment of the bicep is here and the distal attachment of the bicep is here um the shoulder is proximal to the Elbow the the fanges are uh distal to the Elbow so proximal and distal refer to um with well they referred to a structure's origin so um if we're talking about about the digestive system for instance I just get that up so this the digestive system origin the mouth is the pro most proximal part of the digestive system and oh didn't mean to click that and the anus is the most distal part of the digestive system so we could say that the stomach is distal to the esophagus esophagus we could say the anus is distal to the stomach the stomach is proximal to the anus okay so with reference to muscles you often hear the words origin and insertion so the origin is the proximal attachment and the inser insertion is the distal attachment um the origin is attached to the unmovable bone and the insertion is attached to the movable surface of the bone so in the example of the biceps just look at that oh that okay so the short head of the biceps this is the origin it's the proximal are closer to the uh trunk that's the proximal attachment and the distal attachment the distal attachment is down here so that's the insertion and that's that's the B it's inserted onto the bone which is moved and this is the bone that doesn't move so that's the origin and that's that's the insertion um and it it's used for other as well as the digestive system it's and the and muscles it's used to describe blood vessels so you could say so this the origin of blood vessels so you could say the the radial artery is distal to the subclavian artery because the subclavian artery is closer to the origin so that's proximal and distal so we've talked about anterior posterior proximal distal medial lateral Superior inferior um there sometimes you'll hear the word dorsal vental rostral and cordal um in human anatomy this is usually restricted to use uh to being used when referring to the nervous system uh so in the spine um you may hear dorsal roots and vental Roots um and here it's referring to posterior and anterior so dorsal is posterior and ventral is anterior but in the brain these words have a slightly different and specific meaning so if I just zoom into the brain show you what these words mean so in the brain you will hear the words rostral and cordal so rostral means is anterior and cordal is posterior dorsal is superior and ventral is inferior and that's um primarily used in the brain in human anatomy and then in the spinal cord dorsal is posterior and ventral is anterior so that's a little bit confusing but it's useful to be aware of before you start hearing it and getting confused so I think I've covered most of the common the planes and the uh terms to describe location so hopefully that will be useful and you'll remember um remember what these mean when they when you hear them being used just like