The vasculature as a uniform perfusion network

Life is water-based and as a result organisms have developed complex flow networks that optimize the transport of oxygen and nutrients. Given the rich hierarchical structure that characterizes animal and plant vasculature, a question arises: Is there an optimization principle that biological flow networks obey while they self-organize and remodel to efficiently perfuse the tissue? Considering dissipation alone is not enough since it leads to tree-like networks, far from the loopy architecture of animal micro-vasculature. We propose a novel local adaptation rule that stems from an approximation to the optimization process that accounts for homogeneous perfusion, energy dissipation and material cost. The competition between these terms produces rich network morphologies. We also show that our local rule gives promising results when it is applied to experimental data of the rat mesentery network.