NREMT Advanced Emergency Medical Technician (AEMT) Practice Test

Directional terms describe relative location on the body. Dorsal describes the back side; ventral describes the front (belly) side. In humans, this means the spine is on the dorsal surface and the chest/ abdomen on the ventral surface. A handy example is the hand: the dorsal surface is the back of the hand, while the ventral surface is the palm. So dorsal maps to back and ventral maps to front. Pairings like dorsal with front or top don’t fit how these terms are used in human anatomy.