Location: Fields Institute , 222 College Street, Toronto

January 30, 2009- 3:30 p.m.(Audio and slides of talk)
Michael Yampolsky
University of Toronto

Dynamical modeling of human placental vasculature: explaining variability of placental shapes, and metabolic scaling rate (joint project with Carolyn M. Salafia).

Understanding the placenta is central to the study of fetal origins of adult health risks. A placenta is little more than a thin tissue sheath covering a complex vascular network growing like a tree from the point of insertion of the umbilical cord. Normally, a placenta is round, but a deviation from the norm can take many possible shapes. Classification of these shapes has presented an interesting and important challenge for the field of placental pathology. We have proposed a mechanism which explains some of the observed variability by the change in the structure of the underlying vascular tree. We have developed a dynamical growth model for the placental vasculature, based on Diffusion Limited Aggregation, and have demonstrated that a change in the parameters of the growth produces the observed variability. Further evidence of the connection between the placental shape and the structure of the vasculature is given by our version of the Kleiber's metabolic scaling law for fetus and placenta. It gives a quantitative tool for measuring the variation in the structure of the placental vasculature. My talk will describe our results, and some of the interesting open questions.