Vascular Architecture of the Human Brain: Morphometric, Geographic and Territorial Analysis From MRA Data

Detailed knowledge of the brain vascular architecture is important not only for gaining insight into a variety of vascular pathologies and brain diseases, but also when creating arterial tree models to be used for imposing boundary conditions in numerical simulations [1]. A variety of methods have been developed to build realistic arterial trees [2, 3]. Most of these techniques require the specification of a number of parameters and constraints related to the arterial branch geometry and bifurcation characteristics. The purpose of this paper is to provide estimations of these parameters as well as information about the regional distribution of the arterial trees of the brain that can be used to guide or test methods for constructing arterial tree models.