Before revision:  These networks deliver resources and eliminate wastes from early development onward, and even play a vital role in the growth, prognosis, and treatment of tumors and stroke recovery. Because of these basic and applied reasons there is immense interest in identifying key features of vascular branching and their connection to biological function. Here we classify diverse branching networks-mouse lung, human head and torso, angiosperm plants, and gymnosperm plants-by harnessing recent advances in medical imaging, algorithms and software for extracting vascular data, theory for resource-distribution networks, and machine-learning.
After revision:  By combining machine-learning techniques with new theory that relates vascular form to metabolic function, we enable novel classification of diverse branching networks--mouse lung, human head and torso, angiosperm plants, and gymnosperm plants-by harnessing recent advances in medical imaging, algorithms and software for extracting vascular data, theory for resource-distribution networks, and machine-learning.