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Which artery feeds each region?
A quiz on arterial territories: five lit regions, and the arteries of one real person.
Pause the video at each structure and name it before you open the answers.
Show the answers
- Middle cerebral artery: it feeds the side of the brain, the territory strokes hit most often (face, arm, speech).
- Posterior cerebral artery: it feeds the visual cortex at the back. Its stroke most often takes half of the visual field (hemianopia).
- Anterior cerebral artery: it runs along the midline. Its stroke weakens the opposite leg more than the arm.
- Lenticulostriate arteries: tiny branches straight off the first part of the MCA (about 8 per side) into the basal ganglia. Long-standing high blood pressure weakens them, and when one bursts you get the classic deep brain bleed.
- Trick question: both. Where the ACA and MCA territories meet is a border zone (watershed). When blood pressure falls, above all with a narrowed carotid, it is the first place to run short of blood.
Every artery in this video belongs to one person: segmented from his 7 T angiograms and named along the vessels from the circle of Willis.
Sources and licence
Data: 7 T MRI and time-of-flight angiograms of one volunteer (Lüsebrink et al., Sci Data 2021, CC0); arteries segmented and labelled by us; arterial territories from Liu et al., Sci Data 2023 (CC BY-SA 4.0), smoothed for display. Facts: Radiopaedia (MCA territory infarcts; watershed infarct); StatPearls (posterior cerebral artery stroke; lenticulostriate arteries); MedLink (anterior cerebral artery stroke syndromes).
Video licence: CC BY-SA 4.0. To reuse it, credit “Cerebrarium (Aldo Spolaore)”, link to this page and name the data sources above.
Educational content, not medical advice.
