Anatomical structures, cell types, and biomarkers of the healthy human blood vasculature

Abstract

More than 150 scientists from 17 consortia are collaborating on an international project to build a Human Reference Atlas, which maps all 37 trillion cells in the healthy adult human body. The initial release of this atlas provided hierarchical lists of the anatomical structures, cell types, and biomarkers in 11 organs. Here, we describe the methods we used as part of this initiative to build the first open, computer-readable, and comprehensive database of the adult human blood vasculature, called the Human Reference Atlas-Vasculature Common Coordinate Framework (HRA-VCCF). It includes 993 vessels and their branching connections, 10 cell types, and 10 biomarkers. With this paper we are releasing additional details on vessel types and subtypes, branching sequence, anastomoses, portal systems, microvasculature, functional tissue units, mappings to regions vessels supply or drain, geometric properties of vessels, and links to 3D reference objects. Future versions will add variants and connections to the lymph vasculature; and, it will iteratively expand and improve the database as additional experimental data become available through the participating consortia.

Fig. 1

Blood vessel branching. Arrows point in the direction of blood flow. The end of a vessel that branches from another vessel (“BranchesFrom”) and anastomoses with another vessel (“Anastomoses”) is based on the direction of blood flow (arrows) and differs between arterial (left) and venous (right) vascular trees.

Fig. 2

Virtual vessels. Virtual vessels simplify the vascular trees by enabling us to list the branches of a set of vessels only once. In this example of arteries in the kidney, interlobar renal artery is only listed once because both the left and right renal arteries and the multiple segmental arteries have been merged into virtual vessels.

Fig. 3

3D reference objects. We mapped major arteries and veins in the HRA-VCCF to anatomically correct 3D reference objects created by HuBMAP using data from the Visible Human female (left) and male (right) computed tomography (CT) datasets provided by the National Library of Medicine.