internal thoracic artery
An artery that supplies the anterior chest wall and the breasts. It is a paired artery, with one running along each side of the sternum, to continue after its bifurcation as the superior epigastric and musculophrenic arteries. [WP,unvetted]. Every claim on this page comes from the Leumas anatomy graph and carries its source.
What the internal thoracic artery is
An artery that supplies the anterior chest wall and the breasts. It is a paired artery, with one running along each side of the sternum, to continue after its bifurcation as the superior epigastric and musculophrenic arteries. [WP,unvetted]. The atlas records it as a artery at the organ scale in the human body.
Where the internal thoracic artery is
It sits within the cardiovascular system. Not positioned individually. Drawn inside the structure this dataset says contains it — the containment is asserted, the exact spot within it is not.
What the internal thoracic artery connects to
The atlas records 11 typed relationships for it, across 4 kinds of connection. part of subclavian artery.
Supply and innervation
This dataset asserts no arterial supply, venous drainage or innervation for the internal thoracic artery. Only a minority of structures carry those edges here, so an empty answer means nothing has been recorded — not that there is nothing to record.
Also called
Also recorded as internal mammary artery, internal thoracic mammary artery, arteria mammaria interna, arteria thoracica interna and mammary artery. Searching any of those names reaches this page.
Source
Uberon multi-species anatomy ontology (Mungall et al.), CC BY 4.0. Term UBERON:0002456, version 2026-06-19, retrieved 2026-08-24. Licence: CC-BY-4.0.
- Part of: subclavian artery.
- A kind of: systemic artery.
- Supplies: breast.
- contains: anterior intercostal artery, fifth anterior intercostal artery, first anterior intercostal artery, fourth anterior intercostal artery, mammary branch of internal thoracic artery and second anterior intercostal artery, and 2 more.
Questions
Where is the internal thoracic artery?
It sits within the cardiovascular system. Not positioned individually. Drawn inside the structure this dataset says contains it — the containment is asserted, the exact spot within it is not.
What does the internal thoracic artery connect to?
Part of: subclavian artery.
Is the internal thoracic artery the same in other species?
Leumas holds the same relationship vocabulary for every species it carries, so where another dataset records this structure you can put the two side by side on /compare.