Extracorporeal blood ultrafiltration

Abstract

In the present chapter and in the one which follows we are going to deal with treatments performed on blood while circulated out of the patient’s body. It is obvious that such procedures invariably require sophisticated techniques, so it is not surprising that mathematics comes into play in a massive way. Having just described the physiology of kidneys it is rather natural to start with hemodialysis, i.e. blood filtration (or more precisely ultrafiltration) which saves the life of people affected by renal dysfunction. We will describe how to model the modern hemofilter, consisting of a bundle of very thin hollow fibers, and how the treatment interacts with the equilibrium of water and other substances in the patient’s organism. Such a device is certainly a prodigious and hardly improvable technological achievement, but comparing it with the natural system we realize how the latter is inimitably efficient.