Characterization of human head vasculature by percolation parameters

A data reduction procedure, originally proposed for characterization of fra ctals and random percolation clusters, has been used to evaluate the vascul ar system of the human head. The motivation behind this study arose from th e wish to study empirically transport properties of vascular systems and to find a suitable formalism for their description. MR angiographic data acqu ired by a standard 3D inflow method were used. The evaluated parameters ref er to the backbone fractal dimensionality and the correlation length, The f ractal dimensionality of the backbone was found to be 1.71 for the human he ad vasculature, This value fits the theoretical range of random percolation networks. It is concluded that concepts of percolation theory might have s ome value for characterizing the structure and transport properties of the vascular system. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Inc.