CT Diencephalon - Video Lesson

Hey everybody, welcome back. This lesson is about the diencephalon as seen in CT imaging. We'll start with the sagittal plane. This is a sagittal reformation of the brain. In the graphic in the lower left side of the image, you can see this image is midsagittal. This image is also reconstructed in the standard algorithm, and we've displayed this image in the usual windowing technique for looking at the brain. That's about eighty window width and thirty window level. The diencephalon is a collection of neural tissues in the center of the brain. The diencephalon has several features, but our main interest is in a few glands that can be seen in CT imaging. The largest and most prominent feature of the diencephalon is the thalamus. The thalamus is composed of two egg shaped lobes in the center of the brain. In this image, we can see the thalamus forming the floor of the lateral ventricle. The hypothalamus is an aspect of the diencephalon which is below the thalamus. Hypo means below, so it makes sense that the hypothalamus is below