Quite a while ago now, but I used to work at a tissue engineering lab in London. I was interested in how techniques from procedural design and architecture could be brought across, as actually the design of many of the TE scaffolds seemed very crude.
Blood vessels grow according to growth factors that are released in response to hypoxia, I wanted to try and model them as a space colonisation. I never quite got around to producing the actual structures, but some more details here:
In the larger diameter blood vessels, it’s also due to relieving back pressure and finding a path of least resistance. This causes existing pathways to dilate and eventually join together to form a new channel / anastomosis (aortic coarctation is quite an extreme example - because of severe narrowing at the aorta existing blood vessels widen so much they cause notching of the ribs, which is visible on chest x-ray). Things like liver cirrhosis can cause back pressure and dilatation in a similar way.
Indeed. One family member with a rare desease discovered new blood vessels last week after an internal bleeding. These vessels had developed in the wrong places in the stomach and will be closed again and the normal vessels, which had been blocked by blood clothing, will be unblocked.
> another possible adaptive mechanism of coronary circulation to chronic intermittent ischemia of OSA patients is the development of coronary collaterals
Blood vessels grow according to growth factors that are released in response to hypoxia, I wanted to try and model them as a space colonisation. I never quite got around to producing the actual structures, but some more details here:
https://www.rcseng.ac.uk/-/media/files/rcs/standards-and-res...