Hand & Upper Extremity · Peripheral Nerve

Brachial Plexus Explorer

Understand how the plexus connects, relate roots and branches to function, and apply these relationships to brachial plexus cases.

Educational use only

OrthoAnimate modules demonstrate concepts and support teaching. They are not validated patient-specific planning or clinical decision-support systems.

Preview Version 0.8.5 Updated 7 October 2026

Start here

Select a plexus structure to highlight its related muscles and skin. Select a muscle in Upper limb to trace its supplying nerve back to the contributing roots.

Open interactive workspace

What you’ll learn 3 objectives

Trace C5–T1 through trunks, divisions, cords, and terminal nerves.
Relate major collateral and terminal branches to their root contributions.
Connect plexus roots and branch origins to motor and sensory function and plexus lesion patterns.

This is a schematic teaching model with explicit assumptions and limitations. It is not intended for diagnosis, operative navigation, or regional anaesthesia.

Brachial Plexus Anatomy

Reveal labels by tier

Hover or focus to preview. Select to keep a route highlighted. Darker gold marks the posterior pathway.

Muscle

Linked upper limb

Select a plexus structure or a muscle to connect the two views.

Open Upper limb to load the aligned model.

Gold: related muscles. Gold stripes: a shared muscle or grouped asset. Blue: draft skin map; its striped edge is approximate.

Skin opacity 35%

Drag to rotate, pinch to zoom, or use the buttons. Click a muscle through uncoloured transparent skin, or select it from Muscle. A blue patch selects its nerve or root; overlapping patches can also be selected from Skin territory.

Skin territory and display layers

Skin territory

Skin Muscles Bones Isolate highlights

Related muscles and mapping limits

Highlights represent the authored teaching relationships, not predicted weakness or sensory loss. Root selection uses a separate dermatome draft, not the combined peripheral nerve territories. Trunk, division and cord selections restrict peripheral skin artwork to overlap with their contributing draft dermatomes. This overlap illustrates the maps' shared regions; it is not validated cutaneous fibre tracking. The illustrated regions overlap and are incomplete; uncoloured skin is unmapped.

Selecting a muscle shows its supplying nerve's whole cutaneous territory as context. The muscle does not supply that skin, and the skin highlight does not identify the muscle's root contributions.

Some source meshes combine portions with different nerve supply. Their striped highlights do not define the intramuscular boundary. Individual muscle root ranges are distinct from whole-nerve root ranges.

Model subset, motor relationships and all sensory/dermatome artwork await owner clinical review. The shoulder skin cut and closure are display surfaces.

BodyParts3D, © The Database Center for Life Science licensed under CC Attribution 4.0 International. Changes: selected muscles and bones, cropped skin with synthetic closure, triangulation and generated normals. Provenance and skin references · Mapping sources.

Original OrthoAnimate teaching schematic. Conventional anatomy is simplified; normal variation is not shown.

Evidence & governance Assumptions · limitations · provenance · references

Evidence & governance

How to interpret this explorer

Model assumptions

The diagram presents the commonly taught C5–T1 plexus organised as roots, trunks, divisions, cords, and terminal nerves.
Root values and motor or sensory territories use conventional teaching ranges; minor contributions differ among sources and individuals.
The wiring activity tests the conventional topology, including contributions from both lateral and medial cords to the median nerve.
Nerve highlights follow only the stated contributing roots through the plexus. Trunk, division and cord selections show their combined upstream roots. The linked upper-limb view additionally filters each muscle through its authored nerve and root relationships. Highlighting does not represent individual fibres, relative contributions or anatomical variants.

Limitations

Prefixed, postfixed, and other normal anatomical variants are not drawn.
Spatial relationships are simplified and not intended for operative navigation or regional anaesthesia.
Clinical questions teach localisation patterns; they do not establish a diagnosis or recommend management.
The module covers plexus roots, trunks, divisions, cords, branches and their functions. Distal nerve entrapment and injury localisation are outside its scope; deficits are not inferred from pathway highlights.

Attribution and provenance

The plexus schematic, pathway data and activities were authored for OrthoAnimate. The upper limb is a selected BodyParts3D release 4.0 subset, attributed under CC BY 4.0; the skin crop and synthetic shoulder closure are display surfaces. Asset source ledger · Archived source licence page (text) · Third-party notices.

Motor relationships use UAMS nerve tables, Washington University root and muscle tables, StatPearls upper-limb nerves and brachialis dual-innervation research. These are conventional teaching ranges, with individual variation and source differences; the new mapping awaits owner review.

Skin masks are independently authored illustrations, informed by Cutaneous Innervation and separately credited public-domain Carter plates 812/814. Separate dermatome drafts use Medial Antebrachial Cutaneous Nerve and the cutaneous reference; C7 shows the middle-finger key region. Lee et al. discuss dermatome evidence and variability. Articles are cited, not reproduced. All masks and new clinical relationships await owner anatomical/editorial review.

The module uses plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript with a dependency-free WebGL renderer. No external runtime library, upload, analytics or persistent storage is added by the linked model.

Evidence and references 3 selected sources

Davidson MR, Varacallo M. Anatomy, Shoulder and Upper Limb, Brachial Plexus. StatPearls Publishing; updated 2023.
Borschel GH, Clarke HM. Anatomy of the brachial plexus. Journal of Pediatric Rehabilitation Medicine. 2011;4(2):107–111.
Benes M, et al. A meta-analysis on the anatomical variability of the brachial plexus: Part I—Roots, trunks, divisions and cords. Annals of Anatomy. 2021;238:151751.

These references support the conventional organisation and the stated importance of anatomical variation. The list supports this teaching model and is not a systematic review.

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