Avalanches and power-law behaviour in lung inflation

Béla Suki*, Albert László Barabási, Zoltán Hantos, Ferenc Peták, H. Eugene Stanley

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract (may include machine translation)

WHEN lungs are emptied during exhalation, peripheral airways close up 1. For people with lung disease, they may not reopen for a significant portion of inhalation, impairing gas exchange2,3. A knowledge of the mechanisms that govern reinflation of collapsed regions of lungs is therefore central to the development of ventilation strategies for combating respiratory problems. Here we report measurements of the terminal airway resistance, Rt , during the opening of isolated dog lungs. When inflated by a constant flow, Rt decreases in discrete jumps. We find that the probability distribution of the sizes of the jumps and of the time intervals between them exhibit power-law behaviour over two decades. We develop a model of the inflation process in which 'avalanches' of airway openings are seen - with power-law distributions of both the size of avalanches and the time intervals between them - which agree quantitatively with those seen experimentally, and are reminiscent of the power-law behaviour observed for self-organized critical systems4. Thus power-law distributions, arising from avalanches associated with threshold phenomena propagating down a branching tree structure, appear to govern the recruitment of terminal airspaces.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)615-618
Number of pages4
JournalNature
Volume368
Issue number6472
DOIs
StatePublished - 1994
Externally publishedYes

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