Cell Physiology and Fluid Mechanics in the Pulmonary Alveolus and Its Capillaries

Depending on the applied ventilation strategy, mechanical ventilation leads to alveolar epithelial and capillary endothelial damage. Protective ventilatory approaches try to minimize this biotrauma while still ensuring sufficient gas exchange. However, the optimization of ventilation strategies is hampered by the lack of insights into the cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying ventilator-induced lung injury, and by the lack of morphological and biomechanical information pertinent to the development of suitable computational and experimental models for ventilation-dependent biofluid mechanics [13, 15, 30].