  Does the complex processes of angiogenesis during organism development
ultimately lead to a near optimal coronary vasculature in the organs of adult
mammals? We examine this hypothesis using a powerful and universal method,
built on physical and physiological principles, for the determination of
globally energetically optimal arterial trees. The method is based on simulated
annealing, and can be used to examine arteries in hollow organs with arbitrary
tissue geometries. We demonstrate that the approach can generate in-silico
vasculatures which closely match porcine anatomical data for the coronary
arteries on all length scales, and that the optimised arterial trees improve
systematically as computational time increases. The method presented here is
general, and could in principle be used to examine the arteries of other
organs. Potential applications include improvement of medical imaging analysis
and the design of vascular trees for artificial organs.
