Abstract
Analyzing the characteristics of blood flow in the blood vessels is very important to diagnose the circulatory diseases. In order to investigate the hemodynamic characteristics in vivo, the measurements of blood flows inside the extraembryonic arterial and venous blood vessels of chicken embryos were carried out using an in vivo micro-PIV technique. The circulatory diseases are closely related with the formation of abnormal hemodynamic shear stress regions, thereby it is important to get blood velocity and vessel's morphological information according to the vessel configuration and the flow conditions. In this study, the flow images of RBCs in blood vessels were obtained using a high-speed CMOS camera with a spatial resolution of approximately 14.6${\mu}$m${\times}$14.6${\mu}$m in the whole circulation network of blood vessels. The blood flows in the veins and arteries show steady laminar and unsteady pulsatile flow characteristics, respectively. The mean blood flows merged (in veins) and bifurcated (in arteries) smoothly into the main blood vessel and branches, respectively, without any flow separation or secondary flow which accompanying large variation of shear stress. Vorticity was high in the inner regions for both types of vessels, where the radius of curvature varied greatly. The instantaneous flows in the arterial blood vessels showed noticeable pulsatility due to the heart beat, and the main features of the velocity waveforms, including pulsatile shape, retrograde flow, mean velocity, maximum velocity and pulsatile frequency, were significantly dependent on the pulsatile condition which dominates the arterial blood flow. In near future, these in vivo experimental results of blood flow measured in various extraembryonic blood vessels would be very useful to understand the hemodynamic characteristics of human blood flows and various blood flow researches for clinically useful hemodynamic discoveries as well.