Chest Introduction

This tutorial is designed to help you understand the normal anatomy of the chest as seen on CT images in three planes: axial, coronal, and sagittal.

Diseases of the chest and chest abnormalities make up a significant portion of a physician’s daily practice. The chest x-ray is the most important imaging technique in understating the patho-physiology of the many different disease processes that affect the heart and lungs. Obviously, you need to understand the normal anatomy as seen on a plain chest x-ray, however, the CT examination has revolutionized our understanding of many disease states, their origins, the pathology and the results of treatment.

We have created this tutorial linking both CT images and normal anatomical slices of the chest. They can be viewed sequentially both with and without labels. They enable you to understand the relationship between the various structures, both within the heart and lungs, and to follow both the vascular and bronchial trees.

This has been a project that we anticipated completing prior to the end of this section, however, due to logistic problems, we were unable to do so. We are posting the portions that have been completed. Additional work including selective coronal and sagittal slices as well as selective illustrative cases are planned.