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Skull Sutures as Anatomical Landmarks

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The Sutures of the Skull

Abstract

Despite great advances in clinical imaging of the human body, clinical determination of consistent surface landmarks for surgical approaches to the cranial cavity is still essential and can be vital for the safe outcome of operations and to minimize operative and postoperative complications as far as possible. Therefore, our aim here is to highlight the sutures and outer anatomical landmark points of the skull to provide a short simplified guide to the closed box of the cranial cavity to help surgeons and clinicians in their practice. In this chapter, we focus on the outer sutures of the skull vault and face that could be used for surgical approaches, without the excessive details that dominate in other textbooks of anatomy. The skull comprises two main parts: the neurocranium (bony box surrounding the brain) and the viscerocranium (skeleton of the face); each is formed from individual bones. All bones of skull except the mandible are firmly interconnected in adults by immobile fibrous joints called sutures. These sutures form important anatomical landmark points for surgical approaches to the closed box of the neurocranium enclosing the brain, arteries and venous sinuses.

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Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank all members of the College of Biotechnology, Misr University, for Science and Technology (MUST) & Faculty of Medicine, Zagazig University, Egypt for their kind support and assistance throughout this work. The photographs were taken from specimens in the Anatomy Department, Faculty of Medicine, Zagazig University; the diagrams were drawn by the author.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Anatomy and Embryology Department, Faculty of Medicine, Zagazig University, & College of Biotechnology, Misr University for Science and Technology (MUST), Zagazig, Egypt

    Abdelmonem Awad M. Hegazy

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  1. Abdelmonem Awad M. Hegazy
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Medicine, Department of Neurosurgery, Aydın Adnan Menderes University, Efeler, Aydin, Turkey

    Mehmet Turgut

  2. Departments of Neurosurgery, Neurology, Surgery, and Structural and Cellular Biology, Tulane University School of Medicine, Center for Clinical Neurosciences, New Orleans, LA, USA

    R. Shane Tubbs

  3. Department of Radiology, Yüksek İhtisas University, Ankara, Turkey

    Ahmet T. Turgut

  4. Department of Neurosurgery, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA, USA

    Aaron S. Dumont

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Hegazy, A.A.M. (2021). Skull Sutures as Anatomical Landmarks. In: Turgut, M., Tubbs, R.S., Turgut, A.T., Dumont, A.S. (eds) The Sutures of the Skull. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72338-5_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72338-5_10

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-72337-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-72338-5

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