Cell Physiology and Fluid Mechanics in the Pulmonary Alveolus and Its Capillaries

摘要

Depending on the applied ventilation strategy, mechanical ventilation leads to alveolar epithelial and capillary endothelial damage. Protective ventilatory approaches try to minimize this biotrauma while still ensuring sufficient gas exchange. However, the optimization of ventilation strategies is hampered by the lack of insights into the cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying ventilator-induced lung injury, and by the lack of morphological and biomechanical information pertinent to the development of suitable computational and experimental models for ventilation-dependent biofluid mechanics [13, 15, 30]. Here, we present our experimental and simulation studies at the level of the alveoli and their capillaries. Regarding capillary perfusion, we show the results concerning the mechanisms of hypoxic pulmonary vasoconstriction as well as an enlarged experimental model for studying the flow in pulmonary capillary networks. We studied alveolar mechanics, both in the mouse model and in a simulation model, providing insights into the effects of ventilation strategies with regard to the underlying lung injury and disease. Further, we present our results concerning the role of the mechanosensitive transient receptor potential channel TRPV4.