title: Simulated annealing approach to vascular structure with application to the coronary arteries.
abstract: Do the complex processes of angiogenesis during organism development ultimately lead to a near optimal coronary vasculature in the organs of adult mammals? We examine this hypothesis using a powerful and universal method, built on physical and physiological principles, for the determination of globally energetically optimal arterial trees. The method is based on simulated annealing, and can be used to examine arteries in hollow organs with arbitrary tissue geometries. We demonstrate that the approach can generate in silico vasculatures which closely match porcine anatomical data for the coronary arteries on all length scales, and that the optimized arterial trees improve systematically as computational time increases. The method presented here is general, and could in principle be used to examine the arteries of other organs. Potential applications include improvement of medical imaging analysis and the design of vascular trees for artificial organs.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physical Sciences , The Open University , Milton Keynes MK7 6AA, UK.
authors.forename: Jonathan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Keelan
authors.affiliation: Department of Cardiovascular Sciences , University of Leicester , Leicester LE1 5WW, UK.
authors.forename: Emma M L
authors.initials: EM
authors.lastname: Chung
authors.affiliation: Department of Physical Sciences , The Open University , Milton Keynes MK7 6AA, UK.
authors.forename: James P
authors.initials: JP
authors.lastname: Hague
keywords: cardiovascular systems; optimization; simulated annealing; vascular modelling