Modeling Human Lymph Nodes Connectivity

European Community has allocated and will allocate huge resources within the framework of the Virtual Physiological Human to focus on the modeling and simulation of human anatomy and physiology. In the past a number of models have been developed to describe in detail the physical properties of different human organs, but no work has been done on the lymphatic system yet.

Aim of this study is to model and analyze the connectivity of lymph nodes in the Visible Human Male Anatomical data set.  Position and volumes of lymph nodes have been previously extracted from the data set. Although no data is available about how lymphatic vessels connect the different lymph nodes, qualitative information about their connections is present in medical anatomical atlases. In this project you’ll develop an algorithm to connect the different lymph nodes according to a set of simple rules extracted from medical literature. This will lead to a set of networks with different properties. Afterward you’ll test the properties of lymphatic cells trafficking in such networks, possibly identifying the most likely network and describing interesting properties associated to some of them.