The IR Road Map: Vascular Anatomy Overview

The goal of this chapter was to provide an entry-level understanding of the normal vascular arterial and venous anatomy most commonly encountered in interventional radiology. As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words, and we have designed this chapter to be pictorially based. Each vascular region is portrayed with an annotated artist illustration and corresponding example obtained from a vascular CT or MRI scan. The accompanying text provides some context for the new learner. This chapter is not intended to be comprehensive. Rather, it should serve as a foundation upon which to build a more detailed knowledge of vascular anatomy. These additional details are left to the specific organ chapters provided throughout this book or to the numerous available texts already published dedicated to the understanding of normal and variant vascular anatomy.