Week 3

    This week I read through some paper about building microvascular model and use them to help perfusion imaging, especially arterial spin labeling. I found some open source dataset about kidney and brain vessel model. Basically, I didn't find any model about human, but I found mice brain gray matter vessel sliced data and statistic data of mice kidney, showing the diameter and length of different orders of vessels. This is maybe enough to build a kidney model, because the vessel structure of kidney is simpler, like a uniform tree model. But this is not enough to build a brain vessel model, because brain vessel is much more complicated, including different parts such as gray matter and white matter. Also, I met with some problems in data acquisition as Dr. Ajay Gupta doesn't run ASL routinely, I may need to use T1 DCE or angiography data instead.
    I tried to build some vessel model by myself. I finished a tree like vessel model for kidney, and I am working on brain vessel model now.
    I also talked about how this can be used in cerebral metabolic rate of oxygen estimation with another PhD in Dr.Wang's lab. We found that a good vessel structure can help to determine the orientation of white matter of brain, and the white matter orientation may influence the diffusion of water and the MR signal. Also, a good vessel structure can help with the estimation of cerebral blood volume.
    I didn't go to see the surgery with Aaron this week because of time conflict, and I will go and see the surgery next week.