we live in a three-dimensional world and so there's really three directions that we can take medical images from throughout the rest of the series we're looking a lot of medical images and so it's important that we can talk about all three of these those three our frontal sagittal and transverse a cross section is basically if you were to take a human body and you were to make a cross-section or cut it in half somewhere and look at what would you see if you were looking down at that now sly is gonna help out with this so let's imagine I were to cut sly in half right here let me go ahead and cut just kidding I was not about to cut sly in half no animals were harmed in the making of this video let's go to the whiteboard the first plane we have is called a frontal plane it's kind of like we divided the body like this and we're looking from the front at the cross-section this plane is also known as the coronal plane coronal plane it divides the body into an anterior and a posterior half if you need to review those terms check out my video on directional terms so here's the anterior half in blue and the posterior half in green and whenever you look at this it'll look like you're looking at an outline of the human body as if you are looking from the front here's an example this is a frontal x-ray and it shows somebody's spinal fusion this is very similar to what I have in my back after our car wreck damaged a couple vertebrae and those had to be held back together with screws I only have four instead of the six screws that you see here but it's very similar to what my x-ray would have looked like here's another example this is a frontal CT scan and you can see on here the bones of the vertebra you can see the pelvis you can see femurs and you can tell that you're looking from the front so that's a frontal plane up next we have what's called the sagittal plane in the sagittal plane is going to divide the body like this divides it into the left half and right half which you're gonna see on the screen in blue and green again now if we divide the body right down the middle we call that a mid sagittal so if it's divided like this mid sagittal if it's divided kind of off to the side that's just a regular sagittal midsagittal sensual mid sagittal sagittal here's an example we've got a view from the side anytime you see a view from the side you know it's gonna be a sagittal plane you can remember they both start with s side sagittal in this we see you the spinal cord and some organs we're viewing from the side this is a CT scan if you want to know more about scans check out my video han four types of medical imaging and this one is a midsagittal we know it's been sagittal it must be right down the middle because we see the spinal cord right there in the scan here's an example of a regular schedule that's not mid sagittal notice that we don't see the spinal cord so this had to have been off-center a little bit so it's still a sagittal plane but we don't see the spinal cord right down the center so it must be regular sagittal here's another example just cuz I think it's cool this is a sagittal MRI of a brain we can tell we're not looking from the front we're looking from the side so it must be sagittal finally we have what's called a transverse plane and you know it's transverse anytime it doesn't really look like a human I'll show you that in a second the transverse plane cuts across like this and it divides the body into superior and inferior parts you can see that superior in red and in fear in orange here's the first example this is a transverse cross section of the leg and so we see we've got the skin hypodermis muscles bone and it doesn't look like a human it's not the outline of a human and so it's probably gonna be transverse like we cut they leg across like this here's another example this is an example of a transverse cross section of the brain an MRI in this case quick recap we've got three cross sectional planes that we can use to categorize different medical imaging cross sections we have the frontal plane which divides the body like this sometimes it's called a coronal plane we've got the sagittal plane which divides the body into left and right sections mid sagittal that's right on the middle regular satchel if it's to the side and a transverse plane which is gonna cut the body like this into superior and inferior sections before we go take a moment to test your knowledge here's three scans one of each if you need to pause the video and identify which is which remember to go over the answers now in the top left we have a transverse cross section you see the lungs there and the heart on the top right we have a frontal cross section again there are the lungs and a couple arteries going to the heart and then finally we have a sagittal cross-section and this is probably a midsagittal because we can see the spine down the middle there thanks for watching and remember to keep learning don't forget to check some other videos you can click those here now what do you think about cross sectional plains do you have a favorite transverse sagittal frontal should people subscribe should they like the video should they leave a comment how can you say no to that