Week 5

This week I went on building vasculature of brain and kidney. I found some good database giving me angiography data of brain. One database is MIDAS, they provide a designed MR database comprising images of the brain of 100 healthy subjects in which 20 patients were scanned per decade (18-29, 30-39, 40-49, 50-59, and 60+), with each group equally divided by sex, and with exclusion of any subject with a history of diabetes, hypertension, head trauma, psychiatric disease, or other symptoms or history likely to affect the brain. Images were acquired on a 3T unit under standardized protocols. Images include T1 and T2 acquired at 1x1x1 mm3, Magnetic Resonance Angiograpy (MRA) acquired at 0.5 x 0.5 x 0.8 mm3, and Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) using 6 directions and a voxel size of 2x2x2 mm3. In addition to age and sex, handedness and race were also recorded. Another database is Brava. The Brain Vasculature (BraVa) database contains digital reconstructions of the human brain arterial arborizations from 61 healthy adult subjects along with extracted morphological measurements. The arterial arborizations include the six major trees stemming from the circle of Willis, namely: the left and right Anterior Cerebral Arteries (ACAs), Middle Cerebral Arteries (MCAs), and Posterior Cerebral Arteries (PCAs).

Based on these dataset, I build up a brain artery model as shown below. This is a very rough model and I am still working on to add capillary to it.

I also went to see a tumor removal surgery with Aaron shadowing Dr.Schwartz.