Assessing Lung Vasculature Development and Application to Early Pre-term Gestation Patients; a Second Look

Abstract

Bronchopulmonary Dysplasia (BPD) is a chronic respiratory disease associated with preterm gestation. It presents itself in patients from birth through reliance on ventilation devices due to improper lung development. Although the lungs become more independent through infancy, they never develop fully, leading to complications through adolescence and adulthood. This study continues the work done in 2022 by Dias and others, which sought to map the lung vasculature of preterm gestation patients and compare it to full-term gestation patients over time to track the development of lung vasculature. This was achieved using ImageJ software to create a 3-D model of the right lung vasculature. Lung vessels were counted from these 3-D models and compared to evaluate whether a correlation exists between lung vessel counts and gestation age. So far, no definitive evidence has been shown for a correlation.