Cardiovascular Interactions

The complex behaviour of the cardiovascular system is mainly due to A) the multiple interactions between its parts, that is the right and left heart and the systemic and pulmonary circulations, B) a host of regulatory mechanisms heavily conditioning the behaviour of the system, and C) cardiopulmonary interaction. This course will focus on point A), dealing with the mechanical behaviour of the cardiovascular system as a whole considered as a system of compliant tubes with certain resistive properties in which blood flow is produced by two pumps.
The students will learn how to model the systemic and the pulmonary circulation as systems of compliances and resistances in series, and the ventricles as preload- and afterload-dependent pumps. The overall behaviour of the systemic circulation and of the heart-lungs will be described in terms of vascular and cardiac function curves according to Guyton's conceptual framework.
Using these tools, the students will try to predict the behaviour of the system in a number of situations, and compare their predictions with the output of a cardiovascular simulator. The result of the comparisons will then be discussed.
Practically, 2 hours will be dedicated to heart mechanics, 4 to vascular mechanics, 2 to the description of the simulator and the rest of the hours will be used by the students to run the simulator and to discuss the results.