Authors:
Angelos Kyriazis
1
;
Jesús Ruiz-Cabello
1
;
Ignacio Rodríguez
1
;
Sandra Pérez-Rial
2
;
Laura del Puerto Nevado
2
and
Germán Peces-Barba
2
Affiliations:
1
Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain
;
2
Fundación Jiménez-Diaz, CIBER de Enfermedades Respiratorias, Spain
Keyword(s):
Elastase induced emphysema, rat lung mechanical properties, respiratory pressure-volume curve.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Applications and Services
;
Biomedical Engineering
;
Biomedical Signal Processing
;
Computer Vision, Visualization and Computer Graphics
;
Medical Image Detection, Acquisition, Analysis and Processing
Abstract:
The objective of this experiment is to test if the emphysematous and the control rats can be classified according to the pulmonary pressure-volume curves. Emphysema was simulated by instilling elastase to the rat lungs and leaving them to develop the disease for 6 weeks. The pressure-volume curves were acquired by a customdesigned ventilator. The pressure at the inflection point of the inhalation limb of the curves has been used as a feature to separate the two classes of animals. The extension of emphysema in the rat lungs was assessed post-mortem by measuring the mean surface of the alveoli. This was possible after extracting the lungs, slicing them, photographing them and analysing the pictures. The mean surface of the alveoli distinguishes clearly the control from the emphysematous rats, which verifies the deteriorating effect of elastase over the lung alveoli. However, no clear correlation was found between the pressure-volume curves inflection-points and the animal classes.