Related papers: Modeling Full-Scale Leaf Venation Networks
Reinforced elastic sheets surround us in daily life, from concrete shell buildings to biological structures such as the arthropod exoskeleton or the venation network of dicotyledonous plant leaves. Natural structures are often highly…
Complex distribution networks are pervasive in biology. Examples include nutrient transport in the slime mold \emph{Physarum polycephalum} as well as mammalian and plant venation. Adaptive rules are believed to guide development of these…
The leaves of angiosperms contain highly complex venation networks consisting of recursively nested, hierarchically organized loops. We describe a new phenotypic trait of reticulate vascular networks based on the topology of the nested…
Leaf venation is a pervasive example of a complex biological network, endowing leaves with a transport system and mechanical resilience. Transport networks optimized for efficiency have been shown to be trees, i.e. loopless. However,…
The innumerable shapes of plant leaves present a challenge to the explanatory power of biophysical theory. A model is needed that can produce these shapes with a small set of parameters. This paper presents a simple model of leaf shape…
More than five hundred years ago Leonardo Da Vinci found a pattern in the growth of trees nowadays known as the Leonardo's rule. This rule relates the thickness of the stem with the thickness of the branches at different bifurcation stages…
Scientists have long sought to understand how vascular networks supply blood and oxygen to cells throughout the body. Recent work focuses on principles that constrain how vessel size changes through branching generations from the aorta to…
Automatic plant recognition and disease analysis may be streamlined by an image of a complete, isolated leaf as an initial input. Segmenting leaves from natural images is a hard problem. Cluttered and complex backgrounds: often composed of…
Biological transport networks are highly optimized structures that ensure power-efficient distribution of fluids across various domains, including animal vasculature and plant venation. Theoretically, these networks can be described as…
Microvessels -blood vessels with diameter less than 200 microns- form large, intricate networks organized into arterioles, capillaries and venules. In these networks, the distribution of flow and pressure drop is a highly interlaced…
Images of natural systems may represent patterns of network-like structure, which could reveal important information about the topological properties of the underlying subject. However, the image itself does not automatically provide a…
Physarum polycephalum is a single-celled, multi-nucleated slime mold whose body constitutes a network of veins. As it explores its environment, it adapts and optimizes its network to external stimuli. It has been shown to exhibit complex…
Physarum polycephalum is an acellular slime mould that grows as a highly adaptive network of veins filled with protoplasm. As it forages, Physarum dynamically rearranges its network structure as a response to local stimuli information,…
Biology presents many examples of planar distribution and structural networks having dense sets of closed loops. An archetype of this form of network organization is the vasculature of dicotyledonous leaves, which showcases a…
Recent work on self-organized remodeling of vasculature in slime-mold, leaf venation systems and vessel systems in vertebrates has put forward a plethora of potential adaptation mechanisms. All these share the underlying hypothesis of a…
We present a model for mechanically-induced pattern formation in growing biological tissues and discuss its application to the development of leaf venation networks. Drawing an analogy with phase transitions in solids, we use a phase field…
The structure of networks that provide optimal transport properties has been investigated in a variety of contexts. While many different formulations of this problem have been considered, it is recurrently found that optimal networks are…
We present a fully automatic, graph-based technique for extracting the retinal vascular topology -- that is, how different vessels are connected to each other -- given a single color fundus image. Determining this connectivity is very…
Cardiovascular networks span the body by branching across many generations of vessels. The resulting structure delivers blood over long distances to supply all cells with oxygen via the relatively short-range process of diffusion at the…
The identification of vascular networks is an important topic in the medical image analysis community. While most methods focus on single vessel tracking, the few solutions that exist for tracking complete vascular networks are usually…