4 ms·

I work with a consortium that is trying to map the anatomy of the peripheral nervous system. My key take home has been that our knowledge of peripheral anatomy

by tgbugs 6y ago

I work with a consortium that is trying to map the anatomy of the peripheral nervous system. My key take home has been that our knowledge of peripheral anatomy at population scale is woefully inadequate. People look at Vesalius and think "oh, that was settled 500 years ago," but as it turns out it seems that we know far more about the peripheral anatomy of our pets and domestic animals than we do about our own.

sradman 6y ago
Is there a non-intrusive (and hopefully inexpensive) imaging technique that can be used on a living population rather than depending on cadaver dissection? Doppler, ultrasound, or even modified consumer wrist reflective PPG (like in the Apple Watch) should be able to detect the median artery. I imagine nerves are harder to map.
- tlarkworthy 6y ago
  MRI can measure blood flow (not cheap though)
- bewaretheirs 6y ago
  Doppler ultrasound can be used to measure blood flow; I've seen it used in prenatal scans to check for heart defects. I'd think it would be straightforward to use it to locate arteries in the forearm.
mci 6y ago
I once tried to write an algorithm cookbook where the network flow problem would be illustrated by a simplified human circulatory system, and its edge capacities — by the diameters of the major blood vessels (this is how I knew to look for Adachi in this paper). Besides the diameters being different in autopsies and ultrasounds, it turned out that while the mean diameters of the arteries are generally known, as they are used for diagnosing aneurysms, no source I found cared to publish the mean diameter of, say, the left and right gastroepiploic veins. Also, even if 90% of people have the prevalent topology of some branching of blood vessels and only 10% have other variants, there are so many branchings that hardly anyone has a "textbook" circulatory system (that is, if the branchings are independent; I have seen no study of their correlations).

by tgbugs 6y ago

sradman 6y ago

Is there a non-intrusive (and hopefully inexpensive) imaging technique that can be used on a living population rather than depending on cadaver dissection? Doppler, ultrasound, or even modified consumer wrist reflective PPG (like in the Apple Watch) should be able to detect the median artery. I imagine nerves are harder to map.

tlarkworthy 6y ago
MRI can measure blood flow (not cheap though)
bewaretheirs 6y ago
Doppler ultrasound can be used to measure blood flow; I've seen it used in prenatal scans to check for heart defects. I'd think it would be straightforward to use it to locate arteries in the forearm.

mci 6y ago

I once tried to write an algorithm cookbook where the network flow problem would be illustrated by a simplified human circulatory system, and its edge capacities — by the diameters of the major blood vessels (this is how I knew to look for Adachi in this paper). Besides the diameters being different in autopsies and ultrasounds, it turned out that while the mean diameters of the arteries are generally known, as they are used for diagnosing aneurysms, no source I found cared to publish the mean diameter of, say, the left and right gastroepiploic veins. Also, even if 90% of people have the prevalent topology of some branching of blood vessels and only 10% have other variants, there are so many branchings that hardly anyone has a "textbook" circulatory system (that is, if the branchings are independent; I have seen no study of their correlations).