The Physics of Coronary Blood Flow

Dynamics, of fluid or solid objects, is a branch of physics, engineering, and applied mathematics and, as yet, it is not a branch of medicine. Coronary heart disease, on the other hand, is a branch of medicine that, as yet, does not include the dynamics of coronary blood flow. This book is dedicated to bridging these two seemingly disparate ends. The rise of biomedical engineering and biophysics in recent years attests to the need for this genre of books. The challenge is to produce a book that speaks successfully on both sides of the fence.

Autorentext

The author, originally trained in fluid dynamics, has been teaching and working on the dynamics of blood flow in general and coronary blood flow in particular for the past thirty years and has produced a book that will appeal to physicians, physicists and engineers.

Klappentext

Coronary blood flow is blood flow to the heart for its own metabolic needs. In the most common form of heart disease there is a disruption in this flow because of obstructive disease in the vessels that carry the flow. The subject of coronary blood flow is therefore associated mostly with the pathophysiology of this disease, rarely with dynamics or physics. Yet, the system responsible for coronary blood flow, namely the "coronary circulation," is a highly sophisticated dynamical system in which the dynamics and physics of the flow are as important as the integrity of the conducting vessels. While an obstruction in the conducting vessels is a fairly obvious and clearly visible cause of disruption in coronary blood flow, any discord in the complex dynamics of the system can cause an equally grave, though less conspicuous, disruption in the flow.

This book is devoted specifically to the dynamics and physics of coronary blood flow. While relevance to the clinical and pathophysiological issues is clearly maintained, the book approaches the subject from a biomedical engineering point of view. With this perspective, the Physics of Coronary Blood Flow complements other treatments of the subject that focus largely on the clinical and pathophysiological issues. The author, originally trained in fluid dynamics, has been teaching and working on the dynamics of blood flow in general and coronary blood flow in particular for the past thirty years and has produced a book that will appeal to physicians, physicists and engineers.

Inhalt
Static Design Issues.- Modelling Preliminaries.- Basic Lumped Elements.- Forced Dynamics of the RLC System.- The Analysis of Composite Waveforms.- Composite Pressure-Flow Relations.- Lumped Models.- Elements of Unlumped-Model Analysis.- Basic Unlumped Models.- Dynamic Pathologies.