Lung maze modelled in 3D

Caroline Morley, online picture researcher

(Image: Dragos Vasilescu, University of Iowa and the University of British Columbia)

It's no simple matter getting gas in and out of your bloodstream. Far from being empty sacks, our lungs contain an elaborate mass of ever-smaller airways and a network of blood vessels. This magnified image comes from a newly published 3D computer-generated model of a mouse's lung and shows the airways ending in the bobbly structures known as the pulmonary acini, coloured here in yellow, green and orange.

These are where gas passes between the air in the lungs' alveoli and the neighbouring blood vessels, seen here in red and blue. The research team who created the model hope to use it to track how inhaled gases move through the complex system of airways in the lungs and how some lung diseases, such as emphysema, originate and develop.

Eric Hoffman, of the University of Iowa in Iowa City, who worked on the project, says: "How do gases and inhaled substances get there and do they accumulate in one or another acinus? How do they swirl around and clear out? We just don't have a complete understanding how that happens."

Journal reference: PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1215112109

Source: http://feeds.newscientist.com/c/749/f/10897/s/24167867/l/0L0Snewscientist0N0Cblogs0Cshortsharpscience0C20A120C10A0Clung0Emaze0Emodelled0Ein0E3d0Bhtml0Dcmpid0FRSS0QNSNS0Q20A120EGLOBAL0Qonline0Enews/story01.htm

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