Characterization of human head vasculature by percolation parameters

A data reduction procedure, originally proposed for characterization of fractals and random percolation clusters, has been used to evaluate the vascular system of the human head. The motivation behind this study arose from the wish to study empirically transport properties of vascular systems and to find a suitable formalism for their description. MR angiographic data acquired by a standard 3D inflow method were used. The evaluated parameters refer to the backbone fractal dimensionality and the correlation length. The fractal dimensionality of the backbone was found to be 1.71 for the human head vasculature. This value fits the theoretical range of random percolation networks. It is concluded that concepts of percolation theory might have some value for characterizing the structure and transport properties of the vascular system.