The effects of axial diffusion and permeability barriers on the transient response of tissue cylinders. I. Solution in transform space

Abstract

Transient mass transfer in a Krogh tissue cylinder is described by a model taking into account axial diffusion in both blood and tissue, a localized permeability barrier at the capillary membrane and a diffusion barrier on the outer surface and at the ends of the cylinder. Radial diffusion in both blood and tissue is assumed to be infinitely fast. In contrast to previous work, which has usually relied on numerical methods for solving the equations, an exact solution is presented here in Laplace transform space. This allows calculation of the moments of the concentration at any point in the cylinder. Numerical results indicate that the moments of the residence time distribution are affected by the boundary conditions used, and that the discrepancies between the predictions using different conditions may be large in some physiological situations. Order-of-magnitude calculations are used to estimate when the use of simpler models may be feasible. The transform space solution may also be useful for parameter estimation, but it seems preferable to extend the present results to a time-domain solution for this purpose.