On the shape of the common carotid artery with implications for blood velocity profiles
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Clinical and engineering studies typically assume that the common carotid artery (CCA) is straight enough to assume fully developed flow, yet recent studies have demonstrated the presence of skewed velocity profiles. Toward elucidating the influence of mild vascular curvatures on blood flow patterns and atherosclerosis, this study aimed to characterize the three-dimensional shape of the human CCA. The left and right carotid arteries of 28 participants (63 ± 12 years) in the VALIDATE (Vascular Aging--The Link that Bridges Age to Atherosclerosis) study were digitally segmented from 3D contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance angiograms, from the aortic arch to the carotid bifurcation. Each CCA was divided into nominal cervical and thoracic segments, for which curvatures were estimated by least-squares fitting of the respective centerlines to planar arcs. The cervical CCA had a mean radius of curvature of 127 mm, corresponding to a mean lumen:curvature radius ratio of 1:50. The thoracic CCA was significantly more curved at 1:16, with the plane of curvature tilted by a mean angle of 25° and rotated close to 90° with respect to that of the cervical CCA. The left CCA was significantly longer and slightly more curved than the right CCA, and there was a weak but significant increase in CCA curvature with age. Computational fluid dynamic simulations carried out for idealized CCA geometries derived from these and other measured geometric parameters demonstrated that mild cervical curvature is sufficient to prevent flow from fully-developing to axisymmetry, independent of the degree of thoracic curvature. These findings reinforce the idea that fully developed flow may be the exception rather than the rule for the CCA, and perhaps other nominally long and straight vessels.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".