Converging Branches - Vascular Physiology Application

[DThornz]

Greetings,

I am a master's student at Florida International University's Biomedical Engineering Department. I work with Dr. Tsoukias in his Vascular Physiology and Biotransport Lab.

Currently, we are trying to figure out a way to create semi-realistic blood vessel geometries for use in COMSOL implementations.

Your RootBox Toolbox v6b for MATLAB was able to help us make realistic diverging capillary branches but this is where we were running into a problem. Since usually blood vessels go (arterioles --> capillaries --> veins) we have a need to figure out how to have the roots converge back together into one at the end.

The MATLAB code is very well documented but we are not too experienced in the details of L-System or the nuts and bolts of how each functions works so we were wondering if you had any insight on how we could most efficiently create our ideal diverging/converging system using your code?

Our current idea involves essentially make a copy of the adjacency matrix for the diverging branch, flipping it 180 degrees, and then just connecting both trees together but if there is a better way to do it we would love to hear about.

Since we're using the MATLAB toolbox version it'd be great if you could provide explanations using that as a context.