A funiculus is another fancy medical term meaning a bundle of nerve fibers enclosed in a sheath of connective tissue. As a reminder, the spinal cord is a mirror of itself, so the ventral and dorsal horns are on both sides of the cord and match the labeled counterpart. Below we have them labeled so you can see what I am talking about. The ventral horn by comparison is more rounded and spread out. Technically we have three, a smaller (by comparison) lateral horn. The dorsal horn is the more narrow of the two large horns of the spinal cord. To do this we can use the dorsal (posterior) horn and the ventral (anterior) horns. We can use the grey matter to tell us front and back of the spinal cord. In this case we have two other landmarks we can use to determine front and back. While using the anterior median fissure or posterior median sulcus let’s us do that, there are cases where you may see an image of just a portion of the spinal cord, in this case both landmarks might be out of view. Below we have an image with the central canal labeled for you.īecause the spinal cord is a rough mirror image of itself, we cannot really determine left side from right side, just front and back.
#PARTS OF THE SPINAL CORD XSECTION FULL#
It runs the full length of the spinal cord and while this doesn’t tell us front and back, it does help us locate center. We also can point out the central canal which as the name suggests, it is a canal located centrally in the spinal cord that is filled with cerebrospinal fluid. Now we have two landmarks that tell us the front of the cord and the back of the cord. Below is an image highlighting the posterior median sulcus so you can see what I am talking about. While the anterior median fissure is clearly two distinct and separate parts, the posterior median sulcus appears as two lobes that are joined together. Sulcus is a fancy anatomy term meaning a long narrow slit (or a groove) that divides an organ into lobes. Next, we can point out the posterior (or dorsal) median sulcus. You can see the anterior median fissure and this landmark orients us when we’re looking at the spinal slice. So if I could see through you and look at your spinal cord, I would have to look through your chest if I wanted to see the anterior median fissure. Anterior (or ventral) means towards the front. The anterior median fissure is super helpful in orienting us when we are talking about the spinal cord. Note that there is a difference, but they are the same directions in humans), which is a very prominent spinal cord feature that will help orient you next time you see a slice like this. First, let’s talk about the anterior median fissure (labeled below as ventral median fissure, ventral and anterior are interchangeable terms here, but I personally prefer ventral due to the way it’s defined. If you’re looking at this slice of cord and are wondering which side is the anterior side and which is the dorsal, well that is why we are covering this topic today, so let’s get our frame of reference. You may even recall what we are covering today. If you’ve been following along, you know the grey matter, the white matter and you may remember a lot of the features that we’ve covered. Well, we’re here now so let’s go over it.Ībove you see a transverse slice of spinal cord. However, we never really touched on the landmarks we use when we talk about the spinal cord. Probably after the gross anatomy of the cord, which was similar to today.
#PARTS OF THE SPINAL CORD XSECTION SERIES#
Had I planned this series better, I may have done this post closer to the beginning. Over the course of our series I did my best to help orient us by pointing out different features of the spinal cord, but we never really defined what those were explicitly and seperate from the other things we were covering. If I were to drop you off in the middle of some place familiar to you, you would be able to orient yourself and find your way to wherever it is you want to go. So today, we are going to take a detour and go over spinal cord features.Ĭhances are, if you’ve lived in one place for some time you know where you are in relation to the things around you. We never really talked about the landmarks of a spinal cord slice. Today we’re going to backtract (get it?) a little and go over something basic, but something we’ve skipped over to this point. For those of you who are just finding us, we have every one of these posts in our neuroanatomy category in reverse chronological order. Welcome to day thirty-three in our series. Once you’ve read this post, you should be able to identify the major parts and tell which side is the front of the cord.
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