Epicardial Coronary Capacitive Blood Flow

Abstract

Several lumped models have been proposed to characterize the elastic behavior of the epicardial coronary artery, which are based on well-controlled animal experiments. It is still unclear as to which model is most suitable for analyzing the physiological pressure-flow data for the normal catheterization labs. In this research, different perfusion pressure patterns measured from a mongrel dog were used to drive four mathematical models to investigate the influence of the pressure dependence and viscoelastic effect on epicardial capacitive flow. Results show that the nonlinear behavior of the epicardial capacitance can be approximated with a linear model, and the viscoelastic effect only slightly reduces the amplitude of the protosystolic peak. Further analysis in frequency and time domain revealed the underlying mechanism for the above observation. We conclude that a constant capacitance model can be used to analyze the protosystolic data for estimating the epicardial capacitance.