| Abstrakt: |
We have previously reconstructed the entire coronary arterial tree of the porcine heart down to the first segment of capillaries. Here, we extend the vascular model through the capillary bed and the entire coronary venous system. The reconstruction is based on a comprehensive morphometric data previously measured in the porcine heart. The reconstruction was formulated as large-scale optimization process, subject to both global constraints relating to the location of the larger veins, and to local constraints of measured morphological features. The venous network was partitioned into epicardial, transmural and perfusion functional sub-networks. The epicardial portion was generated by Simulated Annealing search for the optimal coverage of the area perfused by the arterial epicardial vessels. The epicardial sub-network and the coronary arterial capillary network served as boundary conditions for the reconstruction of the in-between transmural and perfusion networks which were generated to optimize vascular homogeneity. Five sets of full coronary trees, which span spans the entire network down to the capillary level, were reconstructed. The total number of reconstructed venous segments was 17,148,946±1,049,498 (n=5) which spans orders from -12 (coronary sinus) to 0v capillaries (first segment of venous capillary). Combined with the reconstructed arterial network, the number of vessel segments for the entire coronary network adds up to 27,307,376±1,155,359 (n=5). The reconstructed full coronary vascular network agrees with the gross anatomy of coronary networks in terms of structure, location of major vessels, and measured morphometric statistics of native coronary networks. This is the first full model of entire coronary vasculature that will serve as a foundation for a realistic large-scale coronary flow analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
