Cerebral circulation

Cerebral circulation is the movement of blood through the network of the cerebral artery and cerebral venous system supplying the brain.

see Cerebral blood flow.

Restoring the circulation is the primary goal in emergency treatment of cerebral ischemia.

Microcirculation plays a significant role in cerebral metabolism and blood flow control, yet explaining and predicting functional mechanisms remains elusive because it is difficult to make physiologically accurate mathematical models of the vascular network. As a precursor to the human brain, a paper presented a computational framework for synthesizing anatomically accurate network models for the cortical blood supply in mouse. It addresses two critical deficiencies in cerebrovascular modeling. At the microscopic length scale of individual capillaries, Linninger et al., presented a novel synthesis method for building anatomically consistent capillary networks with loops and anastomoses (=microcirculatory closure). This overcomes shortcomings in existing algorithms which are unable to create closed circulatory networks. A second critical innovation allowed the incorporation of detailed anatomical features from image data into vascular growth. Specifically, computed tomography and two photon laser scanning microscopy data are input into the novel synthesis algorithm to build the cortical circulation for the entire mouse brain in silico. Computer predictions of blood flow and oxygen exchange executed on synthetic large-scale network models are expected to elucidate poorly understood functional mechanisms of the cerebral circulation ¹⁾.