Overview of the human brain and spinal cord

Abstract

During the last decades, there have been tremendous technical developments to study the human central nervous system (CNS) and its connectivity. Modern imaging techniques such as positron emission tomography (PET) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have greatly improved our knowledge of the circuitry of the human CNS. New developments in MR imaging, especially diffusion MRI (“tractography”), allow the visualization of at least the major fibre connections in the human CNS. The second edition of Clinical Neuroanatomy tries to bridge the gap between neuroanatomy and clinical neurology and emphazises human and primate data in the context of the many disorders of brain circuitry so common in neurological practice. In this introductory chapter, an overview is presented of the macroscopy (Sect. 1.2) and microscopy of the CNS and the relations of the brain to the skull, the skull base in particular (Sect. 1.3), and of the spinal cord to the vertebral column (Sect. 1.5). Following an introduction into a developmental ontology of the brain (Sect. 1.4), the various structures of the brain and the spinal cord and their main fibre connections will be discussed, starting with the spinal cord (Sect. 1.5), followed by the brain stem (Sect. 1.6), the cerebellum (Sect. 1.7), the diencephalon (Sect. 1.8), the hypothalamus and the preoptic area (Sect. 1.9) and the telencephalon (Sect. 1.10). The English terms of the Terminologia Neuroanatomica are used throughout.