Quantitative comparison of micro-vasculatures

Angiogenesis is a key component of ontogenesis, but also of tumor development or in some pathology repair (i.e. ischemia). Deciphering the underlying mechanisms of vessel formation is of importance. We aimed at identifying and characterizing the genetic components that are involved in this development. This requires to compare the effect of each gene with respect to the others, hence appeals for quantitative comparisons. To that end, we propose then in this paper a methodology that first transforms a vascular image into a tree and second quantitatively analyze 3D vascular trees. Our preliminary experiments are conducted with images of the renal arterial network of different mutant mice. A first set of quantitative measurements are proposed that allow for group study.