Introduction – Inguinal Region

00:08 In this lecture, we are going to continue looking at the muscles of the anterolateral abdominal wall and focus on the inguinal region and specifically, the inguinal canal.

00:21 So, within the inguinal region, which we spoke about in the first surface anatomy lecture, there was a region lower down on both the left and right side of the abdomen called the inguinal region and this is a really important region, it's a complex area of anatomy that contains numerous structures that are entering and leaving the abdomen including the testes as they migrated down during development. This means that when sperm are produced by the testes that are now in the scrotum, they have to pass back through this region towards the pelvis. The female also has inguinal region and has an inguinal canal, but because their gonads are not located outside of the body, their inguinal canal, as we will see, is that much smaller.

01:14 So, we will look at the inguinal canal in a fair bit of detail, we will look at its boundaries, we will look at the two openings called the inguinal rings and then we will look at the contents in both the male and the female, but specifically in the male, we will look at what we find within the inguinal canal. And then we will look at hernias.

01:31 You have probably come across inguinal hernias before and there's two different types of inguinal hernias, both an indirect and a direct.