Branches
- Mediastinal branches
- Thymic branches
- Pericardiacophrenic artery - travels with the phrenic nerve
- Sternal branches
- Perforating branches
- Twelve anterior intercostal branches, two to each of the top six intercostal spaces. In a given space, the upper branch travelling laterally along the bottom of the rib until it anastomoses with its corresponding posterior intercostal artery. The lower branch of the space anastomoses with a collateral branch of the posterior intercostal artery.
After passing the sixth intercostal space, the internal thoracic artery splits into the following two terminal branches:
- Musculophrenic artery - roughly follows the costal margin
- Superior epigastric artery - continues the course of the internal thoracic artery, travelling downward into the abdominal wall
Read more about this topic: Internal Thoracic Artery
Famous quotes containing the word branches:
“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In the woods in a winter afternoon one will see as readily the origin of the stained glass window, with which Gothic cathedrals are adorned, in the colors of the western sky seen through the bare and crossing branches of the forest.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“We are nothing but ceremony; ceremony carries us away, and we leave the substance of things; we hang on to the branches and abandon the trunk and body.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)