The volumes in this authoritative series present a multidisciplinary
approach to modeling and simulation of flows in the cardiovascular and
ventilatory systems, especially multiscale modeling and coupled
simulations. The cardiovascular and respiratory systems are tightly
coupled, as their primary function is to supply oxygen to and remove
carbon dioxide from the body's cells. Because physiological conduits
have deformable and reactive walls, macroscopic flow behavior and
prediction must be coupled to nano- and microscopic events in a
corrector scheme of regulated mechanisms when the vessel lumen caliber
varies markedly. Therefore, investigation of flows of blood and air in
physiological conduits requires an understanding of the biology,
chemistry, and physics of these systems together with the mathematical
tools to describe their functioning.
Volume 3 is devoted to the set of mediators of the cell surface,
especially ion and molecular carriers and catalytic receptors that, once
liganded and activated, initiate signal transduction pathways.
Intracellular cascades of chemical reactions trigger the release of
substances stored in cellular organelles and/or gene transcription and
protein synthesis. Primary mediators are included in models of regulated
cellular processes, but multiple secondary signaling components are
discarded to allow simple, representative modeling and to manage their
inverse problems.