AJP - Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology, Vol 247, Issue 5 895-R900, Copyright © 1984 by American Physiological Society
Should blood transport kinetics be modeled in metabolic processes?
G. Belforte, B. Bona and G. Molino
We analyze the interaction between blood transport phenomena and uptake
processes when drug kinetics are studied with compartmental models.
Relevant advantages in the physiological interpretation of the model
parameters are obtained when blood transport is explicitly included in the
model. This is done by aggregating into a single compartment all the blood
spaces where no exchange with extravascular spaces takes place and
separating into different blood compartments those spaces where some uptake
and/or return occurs. The proposed strategy extensively uses all available
a priori information about the physiological system, instead of considering
only the information available in the measurements. This modeling approach
has three main advantages: it provides greater insight into the identified
quantities; it allows the introduction of quantitative a priori
information; and it facilitates the experiment design task.
