Transverse plane

Anatomical planes of the body

In medicine, transversal plane (from the Latin transversus 'transverse') denotes a transverse plane at right angles to the longitudinal axis, thus also a horizontal plane if the body axis is vertical . A transverse plane divides the body into an upper and a lower part. An anatomical cut in this plane is called a transversal cut or horizontal cut.

The plane shown in green in the adjacent figure is a transversal plane. All planes parallel to it, shifted up or down, are also transverse planes. There are an infinite number of parallel transverse planes. Rotations around the longitudinal axis are movements in these planes.

Sectional image of an axial stratification obtained by computed tomography (CT) - the shown transverse plane of the human upper abdomen corresponds to the position of the green plane in the figure above

In the imaging processes of radiology - in particular the representations of body cross-sections of certain layer thicknesses ( tomography ) calculated on the basis of the examination data - transverse sections play an important role. They represent the recorded image data in different transversal planes, which follow one another at certain distances along the body axis and thus give an image of the body in axial stratification. During the tomographic examination, a series of transaxial cross- sectional images is created that show the examined body layer by layer transversely.

See also

• Sagittal plane
• Frontal plane
• Anatomical position and direction designations

Individual evidence

1. ^ Karl Zilles, Bernhard Tillmann : Anatomie. Springer, 2010, ISBN 3-5406-9483-8 , p. 3.