Modeling the dynamics of recruitment and derecruitment in mice with acute lung injury

Lung recruitment and derecruitment contribute significantly to variations in the elastance of the respiratory system during mechanical ventilation. However, the decreases in elastance that occur with deep inflation are transient, especially in acute lung injury. Bates and Irvin (8) proposed a model of the lung that recreates time-varying changes in elastance as a result of progressive recruitment and derecruitment of lung units. The model is characterized by distributions of critical opening and closing pressures throughout the lung and by distributions of speeds with which the processes of opening and closing take place once the critical pressures have been achieved. In the present study, we adapted this model to represent a mechanically ventilated mouse. We fit the model to data collected in a previous study from control mice and mice in various stages of acid-induced acute lung injury (3). Excellent fits to the data were obtained when the normally distributed critical opening pressures were about 5 cmH(2)O above the closing pressures and when the hyperbolically distributed opening velocities were about an order of magnitude greater than the closing velocities. We also found that, compared with controls, the injured mice had markedly increased opening and closing pressures but no change in the velocities, suggesting that the key biophysical change wrought by acid injury is dysfunction of surface tension at the air-liquid interface. Our computational model of lung recruitment and derecruitment dynamics is thus capable of accurately mimicking data from mice with acute lung injury and may provide insight into the altered biophysics of the injured lung.