The liver, a functionalized vascular structure

TLDR

The liver is the largest organ and a central metabolic hub that detoxifies substances, making its blood vasculature essential to understand. The study aims to demonstrate that the hepatic multi‑scale vascular network can be predicted using the constructal law of design evolution. The constructal law is applied to model the liver’s vascular architecture, revealing its multi‑scale, tree‑shaped networks and porous systems. The model accurately predicts the dendritic structure and geometrical features of the hepatic artery, portal vein, and hepatic vein, identifies lobule shapes and permeability, and agrees well with anatomical data.

Abstract

Abstract The liver is not only the largest organ in the body but also the one playing one of the most important role in the human metabolism as it is in charge of transforming toxic substances in the body. Understanding the way its blood vasculature works is key. In this work we show that the challenge of predicting the hepatic multi-scale vascular network can be met thanks to the constructal law of design evolution. The work unveils the structure of the liver blood flow architecture as a combination of superimposed tree-shaped networks and porous system. We demonstrate that the dendritic nature of the hepatic artery, portal vein and hepatic vein can be predicted, together with their geometrical features (diameter ratio, duct length ratio) as the entire blood flow architectures follow the principle of equipartition of imperfections. At the smallest scale, the shape of the liver elemental systems—the lobules—is discovered, while their permeability is also predicted. The theory is compared with good agreement to anatomical data from the literature.