Should blood transport kinetics be modeled in metabolic processes?

We analyze the interaction between blood transport phenomena and uptake processes when drug kinetics are studied with compartmental models. Relevant advantages in the physiological interpretation of the model parameters are obtained when blood transport is explicitly included in the model. This is done by aggregating into a single compartment all the blood spaces where no exchange with extravascular spaces takes place and separating into different blood compartments those spaces where some uptake and/or return occurs. The proposed strategy extensively uses all available a priori information about the physiological system, instead of considering only the information available in the measurements. This modeling approach has three main advantages: it provides greater insight into the identified quantities; it allows the introduction of quantitative a priori information; and it facilitates the experiment design task.