Towards a Terminologia Anatomica Humana

Abstract

Unfortunately, the long-awaited revision of the official anatomical nomenclature, the Terminologia Anatomica 2 (TA2), which was issued in 2019 and after a referendum among the Member Societies officially approved by the General Assembly of the International Federation of Associations of Anatomists in 2020, is built on a new version of the Regular Anatomical Terminology (RAT) rules. This breaks with many traditional views of terminology. These changes in the Terminologia Anatomica of 1998 (TA98) met great resistance within many European Anatomical Societies and their members are not willing to use terms following the RAT rules. European anatomy teachers and scientists using traditional Latin in their teaching, textbooks and atlases will keep using the TA98. The German Anatomical Society (Anatomische Gesellschaft) recently announced the usage of the TA2023AG in curricular anatomical media such as textbooks and atlases, based on the TA98 and the Terminologia Neuroanatomica (TNA). We are preparing a more extensive improvement of the TA98, called Terminologia Anatomica Humana (TAH). This project is fully based on the noncontroversial terms of TA98, incorporating the recent digital version (2022) of the TNA from 2017. Further, it is completed with many new terms, including those in TA2, along with their definitions and relevant references, clinical terms, and correcting inconsistencies in the TA98. The TAH is still in process, but many chapters are already freely available at the IFAA Website in Fribourg (https://ifaa.unifr.ch) as is the digital version of the TNA.