Modeling the Impact of Abdominal Pressure on Hypoxia in Laboratory Swine¹

This paper presents an experimentally parameterized model of the dynamics of oxygen transport in a laboratory animal that simultaneously experiences: (i) a reduction in inspired oxygen plus (ii) an increase in intra-abdominal pressure. The goal is to model the potential impact of elevated intra-abdominal pressure on oxygen transport dynamics. The model contains three compartments, namely, the animal’s lungs, lower body vasculature, and upper body vasculature. The model assumes that intra-abdominal pressure affects the split of cardiac output among the two vasculature compartments and that aerobic metabolism in each compartment diminishes with severe hypoxia. Fitting this model to a laboratory experiment on an adult male Yorkshire swine using a regularized nonlinear least-squares approach furnishes both physiologically plausible parameter values plus a reasonable quality of fit.