Understanding Anatomical Directions and Planes

Alright, now anterior and posterior. Something that is anterior is going to be towards the front. Alright, so we look over here, we see this arrow. So towards the front. Posterior is going to be towards the back. And again, here in the parentheses, we see that ventral and dorsal, again, referring to animals there. The example they give, the breastbone is anterior to the spine. So if we saw that breastbone here, and then we have the spine, so that would be the breastbone is anterior to the spine. And then we look at the heart. The heart is posterior to the breastbone. This might be a little tricky if you're not familiar with the anatomy. So we have the breastbone, then we have the heart. That's here. So we have the heart being posterior to the breastbone. All right. And then I'm going to kind of go back and forth because next two terms was split between two slides. So we have something that is medial. All right. So first of all, you can imagine the body and putting a midline right down the middle of the body. Okay. For the most part, we are a bilateral organism for the most part, right? So we could create a midline. All right, then something that is going towards the midline is going to be medial. Okay, so the heart is medial to the arm. So where we have the heart here, there is, here's the heart, and then here's the arm, right? So here we have lateral. Lateral is going away from that midline. So I just, we just did the previous on the previous slide. Go back here because we were talking about medial. Medial is going towards the midline and now we have lateral. So lateral is going away from that midline. Okay, the example they give you, the arms are lateral to the chest. Okay, so now you're like, well, what if there's something in between? So now we have an intermediate. So between a more medial and a more lateral structure. So now you're like, okay, well, what about if we have the armpit? All right, so the armpit is going to be intermediate between the breastbone and the shoulder. Alright, so here we have proximal. Now, if you look at the word itself, if someone's within your proximity, that means they're really close, right? Now, proximal and distal can be a little more confusing because we have to make a comparison, right? So we're looking at a point of origin. Okay. So how does something compare to that point of origin? So something that's going to be proximal is going to be close to the origin of the body. The elbow, the example that they give you over here, the elbow is proximal to the wrist. Okay. So the elbow is proximal to the wrist. Okay. Meaning that the elbow is closer to the shoulder or attachment point of the arm. than the wrist is. Okay. So what we have here are three points that they're actually comparing if you catch that. So we're looking at the shoulder, we're looking at the elbow, and then we're looking at the wrist. So the elbow is proximal because it's closer. Now distal would be more further away. So now if I'm going to come back up here to my wrist example, the wrist is now distal because it's more furthest away compared to the elbow to that point of origin. Hopefully that makes sense. So distal, and again, look at the word to define the word. If someone is distal or distant, they're away. So we're further from the origin of the body part or the point of attachment of the limb to the body trunk. The example that they give you is that the knee is distal to the thigh. The knee is distal to the thigh. So we have the knee, we have the thigh, and then we have that point of origin. So that is the most distal point. As you're writing this out, if you also even, as I went through and kind of explained what that point of origin is, you can include that in your description. And that might help you to visualize proximal versus distal. All right, then superficial. We have something that's towards the body surface. Usually we hear this in our everyday language. We hear of like a superficial wound or a superficial scratch. So that's just going to be towards the body surface. Then something is going to be deep. We now have something that is away from that body surface, something that's going to be more internal. So if you have a deep cut, that's when you would want to go to the doctor and possibility of having stitches. All right, so let's practice this. In your homework sheet, you're going to have to do a couple of these. And you can choose, like I said, use general language. Don't worry about any specific language. But let's go through superficial, I'm sorry, superior and inferior, just because we had just finished that. It was on my brain there. All right, so here's our face. If we look at the eyes to the mouth, right, so we can say that the eyes are superior to the mouth. Now I'm just going to go ahead. Flip that since I already have this written on my board. I'm going to say that the mouth is inferior to the eyes. Then if we look at this view, we can tell that this is an anterior view. By the way, let me point this out. This is a better drawing of that correct anatomical position where the feet are facing, they're flat and facing forward. We have the palms facing forward as you see those thumbs. As you can imagine, because if those... The hand was facing in a different direction that would change your orientation. So this gives us again that universal language. So we have the anterior, we have the posterior view. So now if we look at the sternum, okay, so we have the sternum that's here. And then we have the spine, obviously not drawn to scale and not having scoliosis. Okay, so we look at the sternum. And compare that to the vertebrae or the spine. All right, so we look at this. The sternum is going to be anterior to the spine. Or flip-flop that, the spine is posterior to the sternum. All right, and let's do our proximal and distal. So I'm going to take that shoulder again, okay? So this is our point of origin. I'm going to take the elbow to the fingertips. All right, so the elbow is proximal. because we're comparing that it's more closer to the point of origin and those fingers are going to be distal. Okay then the body landmarks. I'm just going to mention these because I'm not going to read through each of these but make sure that you take a look at this figure the 1.5. When you get to the lab itself there are some questions that are pointing this out but essentially we're looking for some body landmarks. And all we're doing is we're kind of identifying a basic area or region where something is. Okay, so it's kind of like going to the doctor when the doctor says, where does it hurt? Okay, well, it hurts here, right? So there's a lot of different terminology that we're going to start to use to try to narrow down what we're talking about. But again, this is terminology that we would see. These are the anterior body landmarks. And if you look at some of these names, they should make sense. So we have the umbilical region. Look at where it's pointing to. We have the sternal region. Well, here's the sternum that I drew on that previous slide that we were talking about. Bucal. Well, maybe you've heard of this if you guys like to watch CSI and things like that. If someone talks about getting a buccal swab, they're doing a swab of the mouth. So we're talking about the inside of the mouth. I'm just pointing out a couple more. I said you can go through and look at each of these. They should make sense. Patellar, we're looking at the knee. And then on a few of these, I try to think of little things to help me remember. We have the axillary. And if you look at the axillary, we're looking at this armpit region. And then if you have anyone that uses that ax spray, I just remember that. They always spray way too much of that ax spray. Okay, so that's the anterior view. Posterior view. I mentioned this on one of the very first slides going through anatomical terminology. The cephalic region, the word, the prefix cephal is referring to head because you talk about cephalization in terms of evolution, things like that. So we're referring to the head. Occipital, you find the occipital bone at the base of the skull. Deltoid, sounds like the muscle, doesn't it? So again, we just see some associations with some of those names. So one of the questions that you're going to see is how are these names? And a lot of them are named based on structures that are found within the same area. So we have the femoral region. Well, we have the femur, the bone. We have the femoral artery and vein that are also found there. So a lot of these, the glutes, gluteus maximus, gluteus minimus, the sacral region from the sacrum of the bone. Okay, so again, a lot of these are named based on what is found in the area. I always remember this one since I don't get to see you guys in class. We have the popliteal, which is the back of the knee. And I always remember this one because every time I get up, my knees are starting to pop, but I'm old, so that starts to happen. All right, those are the body landmarks for the posterior view. All right, then body planes. Okay, body planes, what we're doing is looking at an entire plane of the body. So if we were to dissect that body out, what will we actually see? If we do a median plane. What we see with the medium plane is that we are separating the body from the left and the right side. Now, I also did not mention this, so I'm going to put this in here now. When we look at anatomical left and right, we're looking at how that person, what is the orientation of that person. I'll be going over this again with the lab stuff. But this is the left and this is anatomical right. So you kind of have to switch that because now that you are looking at this and looking at the PowerPoint or looking at the notes, the right, anatomical right now becomes your left and anatomical left now becomes your right. So you kind of have to switch your orientation and flip your orientation. Okay, but median is going to separate that anatomical right from anatomical left. All right, the frontal plane. I'm trying to draw it like I'm thinking like 3D on a two-dimensional sheet here, right? So we have the frontal plane, which is going to separate the front from the back, okay? The front from the back. Then we have the transverse plane, which is going to truncate that body. I think like a trunk of a tree, which is going to separate the top from the bottom. Now where this is useful, I love these images being in here because it gives us an orientation of what we're looking at. So we can see here, we're looking at the lateral view, that here's the brain and here's the spinal cord. So we have a median plane in order to be able to see. So if we were looking right here, okay, and that's what we're looking at. So again, this just gives us the orientation of what we're looking at. All right, the body cavities. So the body is a very organized system. So it's not like everything's just kind of floating around in there. So we have some very organized spaces. And I think of them as like balloons. So we have this balloon. We have this membrane that's encasing this part. And then we have all the stuff that's in there. So we look at the first cavity. We have the cranial cavity, which makes sense. We have the brain. We have the thoracic cavity, which is going to house the lungs and the heart. Then we have the diaphragm. The diaphragm is not a cavity per se, but this is the separation between the thoracic cavity and the abdominal cavity. All right, we have the abdominal cavity itself since I just said that. Down at the bottom, we have the pelvic cavity. Okay, and then collectively, both the abdominal cavity and the pelvic cavity is the abdominopelvic cavity. So these are just combined. And then collectively with the cranial cavity and spinal cavity, we have the dorsal body cavity. All right, then the abdominopelvic quadrants, this is actually in your lab manual as well. So you might want to put like a little star here on the PowerPoint. Okay, if we think of quad, we're talking about four. So if we take this, the abdominal cavity, and we divide this into quadrants, we refer to this as the left upper quadrant. Okay, we have the right upper quadrant, the right lower quadrant, and then we have the left lower quadrant. So again, it gives you orientation and where things are actually going to be located. All right, then finally, finishing up with the abdominal pelvic regions. This is split into, it's always, think of like a tic-tac-toe, but I'm going to start in the middle. Okay, isn't that always where you go in tic-tac-toe? Start in the middle. All right, we have the umbilical region. Well, that should make sense. Belly button right here. All right, then looking at these, I know there's a lot of big words that are here, but break the words down. Remember I told you that hyper-specific language that we like to use? All right, so we have epi. meaning above or upon. We have gastric, okay? And if you think about the stomach, well, the stomach would be about right here. Now let's go down to hypo, okay? Hypo meaning below. Well, good. It's below that gastric region, right? So epi meaning upon and hypo meaning below. Now we go over here to the left. Remember that whole anatomical position, right? This is the left anatomical. sign, and this is the right anatomical sign. But we have the left hypochondriac region. We have the left lumbar region. And if you think about where the vertebrae are, remember that lumbar? That was actually on that terminology page. We saw it like two slides before. Okay, so the left lumbar region. And then we have the left iliac. Right, then over on the right. Once we've learned the left, we've learned to write or vice versa. We just put right or left to it. Okay, so like I said, this is actually on your lab manual that you guys are going to be doing within the lab. So again, mark this page within the notes that you can use it for later. All right, so that finishes us up for our first set of notes.

Alright, now anterior and posterior. Something that is anterior is going to be towards the front. Alright, so we look over here, we see this arrow.

So towards the front. Posterior is going to be towards the back. And again, here in the parentheses, we see that ventral and dorsal, again, referring to animals there.

The example they give, the breastbone is anterior to the spine. So if we saw that breastbone here, and then we have the spine, so that would be the breastbone is anterior to the spine. And then we look at the heart.

The heart is posterior to the breastbone. This might be a little tricky if you're not familiar with the anatomy. So we have the breastbone, then we have the heart. That's here.

So we have the heart being posterior to the breastbone. All right. And then I'm going to kind of go back and forth because next two terms was split between two slides.

So we have something that is medial. All right. So first of all, you can imagine the body and putting a midline right down the middle of the body. Okay.

For the most part, we are a bilateral organism for the most part, right? So we could create a midline. All right, then something that is going towards the midline is going to be medial.

Okay, so the heart is medial to the arm. So where we have the heart here, there is, here's the heart, and then here's the arm, right? So here we have lateral.

Lateral is going away from that midline. So I just, we just did the previous on the previous slide. Go back here because we were talking about medial.

Medial is going towards the midline and now we have lateral. So lateral is going away from that midline. Okay, the example they give you, the arms are lateral to the chest. Okay, so now you're like, well, what if there's something in between?

So now we have an intermediate. So between a more medial and a more lateral structure. So now you're like, okay, well, what about if we have the armpit?

All right, so the armpit is going to be intermediate between the breastbone and the shoulder. Alright, so here we have proximal. Now, if you look at the word itself, if someone's within your proximity, that means they're really close, right? Now, proximal and distal can be a little more confusing because we have to make a comparison, right? So we're looking at a point of origin.

Okay. So how does something compare to that point of origin? So something that's going to be proximal is going to be close to the origin of the body. The elbow, the example that they give you over here, the elbow is proximal to the wrist.

Okay. So the elbow is proximal to the wrist. Okay. Meaning that the elbow is closer to the shoulder or attachment point of the arm. than the wrist is.

Okay. So what we have here are three points that they're actually comparing if you catch that. So we're looking at the shoulder, we're looking at the elbow, and then we're looking at the wrist. So the elbow is proximal because it's closer.

Now distal would be more further away. So now if I'm going to come back up here to my wrist example, the wrist is now distal because it's more furthest away compared to the elbow to that point of origin. Hopefully that makes sense.

So distal, and again, look at the word to define the word. If someone is distal or distant, they're away. So we're further from the origin of the body part or the point of attachment of the limb to the body trunk. The example that they give you is that the knee is distal to the thigh.

The knee is distal to the thigh. So we have the knee, we have the thigh, and then we have that point of origin. So that is the most distal point. As you're writing this out, if you also even, as I went through and kind of explained what that point of origin is, you can include that in your description. And that might help you to visualize proximal versus distal.

All right, then superficial. We have something that's towards the body surface. Usually we hear this in our everyday language. We hear of like a superficial wound or a superficial scratch.

So that's just going to be towards the body surface. Then something is going to be deep. We now have something that is away from that body surface, something that's going to be more internal.

So if you have a deep cut, that's when you would want to go to the doctor and possibility of having stitches. All right, so let's practice this. In your homework sheet, you're going to have to do a couple of these. And you can choose, like I said, use general language.

Don't worry about any specific language. But let's go through superficial, I'm sorry, superior and inferior, just because we had just finished that. It was on my brain there. All right, so here's our face.

If we look at the eyes to the mouth, right, so we can say that the eyes are superior to the mouth. Now I'm just going to go ahead. Flip that since I already have this written on my board.

I'm going to say that the mouth is inferior to the eyes. Then if we look at this view, we can tell that this is an anterior view. By the way, let me point this out.

This is a better drawing of that correct anatomical position where the feet are facing, they're flat and facing forward. We have the palms facing forward as you see those thumbs. As you can imagine, because if those...

The hand was facing in a different direction that would change your orientation. So this gives us again that universal language. So we have the anterior, we have the posterior view. So now if we look at the sternum, okay, so we have the sternum that's here. And then we have the spine, obviously not drawn to scale and not having scoliosis.

Okay, so we look at the sternum. And compare that to the vertebrae or the spine. All right, so we look at this. The sternum is going to be anterior to the spine.

Or flip-flop that, the spine is posterior to the sternum. All right, and let's do our proximal and distal. So I'm going to take that shoulder again, okay?

So this is our point of origin. I'm going to take the elbow to the fingertips. All right, so the elbow is proximal.

because we're comparing that it's more closer to the point of origin and those fingers are going to be distal. Okay then the body landmarks. I'm just going to mention these because I'm not going to read through each of these but make sure that you take a look at this figure the 1.5.

When you get to the lab itself there are some questions that are pointing this out but essentially we're looking for some body landmarks. And all we're doing is we're kind of identifying a basic area or region where something is. Okay, so it's kind of like going to the doctor when the doctor says, where does it hurt?

Okay, well, it hurts here, right? So there's a lot of different terminology that we're going to start to use to try to narrow down what we're talking about. But again, this is terminology that we would see.

These are the anterior body landmarks. And if you look at some of these names, they should make sense. So we have the umbilical region.

Look at where it's pointing to. We have the sternal region. Well, here's the sternum that I drew on that previous slide that we were talking about.

Bucal. Well, maybe you've heard of this if you guys like to watch CSI and things like that. If someone talks about getting a buccal swab, they're doing a swab of the mouth.

So we're talking about the inside of the mouth. I'm just pointing out a couple more. I said you can go through and look at each of these. They should make sense. Patellar, we're looking at the knee.

And then on a few of these, I try to think of little things to help me remember. We have the axillary. And if you look at the axillary, we're looking at this armpit region.

And then if you have anyone that uses that ax spray, I just remember that. They always spray way too much of that ax spray. Okay, so that's the anterior view. Posterior view. I mentioned this on one of the very first slides going through anatomical terminology.

The cephalic region, the word, the prefix cephal is referring to head because you talk about cephalization in terms of evolution, things like that. So we're referring to the head. Occipital, you find the occipital bone at the base of the skull.

Deltoid, sounds like the muscle, doesn't it? So again, we just see some associations with some of those names. So one of the questions that you're going to see is how are these names? And a lot of them are named based on structures that are found within the same area. So we have the femoral region.

Well, we have the femur, the bone. We have the femoral artery and vein that are also found there. So a lot of these, the glutes, gluteus maximus, gluteus minimus, the sacral region from the sacrum of the bone. Okay, so again, a lot of these are named based on what is found in the area. I always remember this one since I don't get to see you guys in class.

We have the popliteal, which is the back of the knee. And I always remember this one because every time I get up, my knees are starting to pop, but I'm old, so that starts to happen. All right, those are the body landmarks for the posterior view.

All right, then body planes. Okay, body planes, what we're doing is looking at an entire plane of the body. So if we were to dissect that body out, what will we actually see?

If we do a median plane. What we see with the medium plane is that we are separating the body from the left and the right side. Now, I also did not mention this, so I'm going to put this in here now. When we look at anatomical left and right, we're looking at how that person, what is the orientation of that person. I'll be going over this again with the lab stuff.

But this is the left and this is anatomical right. So you kind of have to switch that because now that you are looking at this and looking at the PowerPoint or looking at the notes, the right, anatomical right now becomes your left and anatomical left now becomes your right. So you kind of have to switch your orientation and flip your orientation. Okay, but median is going to separate that anatomical right from anatomical left.

All right, the frontal plane. I'm trying to draw it like I'm thinking like 3D on a two-dimensional sheet here, right? So we have the frontal plane, which is going to separate the front from the back, okay? The front from the back.

Then we have the transverse plane, which is going to truncate that body. I think like a trunk of a tree, which is going to separate the top from the bottom. Now where this is useful, I love these images being in here because it gives us an orientation of what we're looking at. So we can see here, we're looking at the lateral view, that here's the brain and here's the spinal cord.

So we have a median plane in order to be able to see. So if we were looking right here, okay, and that's what we're looking at. So again, this just gives us the orientation of what we're looking at.

All right, the body cavities. So the body is a very organized system. So it's not like everything's just kind of floating around in there. So we have some very organized spaces.

And I think of them as like balloons. So we have this balloon. We have this membrane that's encasing this part.

And then we have all the stuff that's in there. So we look at the first cavity. We have the cranial cavity, which makes sense. We have the brain.

We have the thoracic cavity, which is going to house the lungs and the heart. Then we have the diaphragm. The diaphragm is not a cavity per se, but this is the separation between the thoracic cavity and the abdominal cavity. All right, we have the abdominal cavity itself since I just said that.

Down at the bottom, we have the pelvic cavity. Okay, and then collectively, both the abdominal cavity and the pelvic cavity is the abdominopelvic cavity. So these are just combined. And then collectively with the cranial cavity and spinal cavity, we have the dorsal body cavity.

All right, then the abdominopelvic quadrants, this is actually in your lab manual as well. So you might want to put like a little star here on the PowerPoint. Okay, if we think of quad, we're talking about four.

So if we take this, the abdominal cavity, and we divide this into quadrants, we refer to this as the left upper quadrant. Okay, we have the right upper quadrant, the right lower quadrant, and then we have the left lower quadrant. So again, it gives you orientation and where things are actually going to be located. All right, then finally, finishing up with the abdominal pelvic regions. This is split into, it's always, think of like a tic-tac-toe, but I'm going to start in the middle.

Okay, isn't that always where you go in tic-tac-toe? Start in the middle. All right, we have the umbilical region. Well, that should make sense.

Belly button right here. All right, then looking at these, I know there's a lot of big words that are here, but break the words down. Remember I told you that hyper-specific language that we like to use? All right, so we have epi.

meaning above or upon. We have gastric, okay? And if you think about the stomach, well, the stomach would be about right here. Now let's go down to hypo, okay? Hypo meaning below.

Well, good. It's below that gastric region, right? So epi meaning upon and hypo meaning below.

Now we go over here to the left. Remember that whole anatomical position, right? This is the left anatomical. sign, and this is the right anatomical sign.

But we have the left hypochondriac region. We have the left lumbar region. And if you think about where the vertebrae are, remember that lumbar? That was actually on that terminology page. We saw it like two slides before.

Okay, so the left lumbar region. And then we have the left iliac. Right, then over on the right. Once we've learned the left, we've learned to write or vice versa.

We just put right or left to it. Okay, so like I said, this is actually on your lab manual that you guys are going to be doing within the lab. So again, mark this page within the notes that you can use it for later. All right, so that finishes us up for our first set of notes.

Transcript for:Understanding Anatomical Directions and Planes

Transcript for:
Understanding Anatomical Directions and Planes