As you learn anatomy, of course, the body is this highly complex three dimensional structure. But we often look at representations of the body that are in two dimensions. So we often divide the body along two dimensional planes. And that's for dissection imaging diagrams, whatever these planes by which we divide the body, we call anatomical planes. And we're gonna have some very specific ways that we refer to them. Anatomical planes are just these imaginary lines used to divide the body. We're gonna have four major planes that we're going to learn. Now, three of them just cut along the xy and Z axis. And then the fourth one is just a little bit of a wild card. So let's go through them. Now, one by one, first up, we have the frontal plane, the frontal plane divides the anterior and posterior. So here we have an anatomical model and you can see the frontal plane kind of divides him, his front from his back. And you can remember the frontal plane because if you look at the plane, the frontal plane, you're looking at it from the front, the frontal plane shows the front. Next, we're gonna have a sagittal plane, the sagittal plane divides the left oops left and right side of the body. And if you look at this anatomical model in this diagram, you see that this plane is going sort of right down through his nose front to back, separating his two sides. Now, we're gonna have two varieties of this sagittal plane. First, we have what we see in the diagram that's a midsagittal plane, midsagittal plane that prefix mid, it goes through the mid line, right through the nose, right through the belly button, et cetera. Now, if it's not on that midline, you have a parasag plane. So a parasag plane divides the body left and right, but not in perfect halves. So we just say here, not on the midline. Now, our way to remember a sagittal plane, a sagittal plane separates the sides of the body. And if you're to look at a sagittal plane, you look at the body from the side. So let's look at our final two planes here, our final two planes. Well, first, we have transverse, transverse divides the superior and inferior. And we have an anatomical model here and there's the plane going sort of through his waist, separating his top and lower halves. Now, transverse, that plane could cut anywhere in the body from the toes all the way up to the nose or to the top of the head really. But the point is t for transverse cuts off the top of the body transverse is a horizontal plane that separates the top from the bottom. Now, finally, we said we had one wild card. That wild card is the oblique plane. The oblique plane is just if it's not one of those first three, it's oblique and that means it divides on some angle. So here we have a man standing and this plane is cutting sort of from close to the shoulder down to the hip, right? It could be any way. But if it's not on a perfect xy or Z axis, then it's an oblique plane. Now oblique will make an oblong. Ok. The cut from an oblique plane is, it's kind of a, a longer, it's usually like some weird oval shape in the body. It doesn't look like a standard cut through the body because it's not on the normal axis. OK. With that, those are our four major planes. We're gonna practice them some more. And then we're gonna look at what the body looks like when we cut the planes different ways that's gonna be called anatomical sections and we'll see you there.
