Speaker
Description
We present a discrete-time compartmental model for human circulation that couples pulsatile blood flow with physiological transport processes. The cardiovascular system is represented as a conservative network of interconnected compartments corresponding to major organs and vascular regions, including the heart, lungs, brain, kidneys, liver, gastrointestinal system, systemic tissue beds, and venous reservoir. Blood volume is treated as the primary dynamical state variable, allowing natural enforcement of global conservation laws while deriving pressures from compartment compliance relationships.
Flows between compartments are driven by pressure differences and vascular resistances, with directional flow enforced through valve-like constraints. Cardiac pumping is modeled through periodically varying ventricular compliance, producing pulsatile circulation within a computationally efficient reduced-order framework.
A primary motivation for the model is extension to transported substances such as oxygen, sodium, glucose, metabolic waste, hormones, and pharmaceuticals. Because transport follows dynamically computed blood flow, the framework naturally supports coupling among circulation, metabolism, filtration, and organ-level exchange. Future directions include autoregulation, biochemical transport, and applications to collateral organ dysfunction and sepsis.
