Effects of ventilation and pleural effusion on measurements of pulmonary tissue volume and blood flow by airway gas temperature in the dog. Kano, Aki, Kenjiro Kambara, Michio Arakawa, Fumio Ando, Michiya Ohno, Masago Tsuchiya, Kazuhiko Nishigaki, and Hisayoshi Fujiwara. Second Department of Internal Medicine, Gifu University School of Medicine, 40 Tsukasa-machi, Gifu City, Gifu 500, Japan
APStracts 2:0240A, 1995.
We studied the effects of ventilation and pleural effusion on measurements of pulmonary tissue volume (so-called airway thermal volume) and pulmonary blood flow using the airway gas thermometry method of Serikov et al. in 39 anesthetized, closed-chest, ventilated dogs with or without lung edema or pleural effusion. To examine the differential effects of increased-pressure and increased-permeability lung edema on accuracy and sensitivity of airway thermal volume and pulmonary blood flow, two models of lung edema were induced by intravenous infusion of a dextran-70 solution and alloxan monohydrate, respectively. Dogs were hyperventilated for 3 min using a wide range of minute ventilation to produce two steady-state conditions of airway temperature. Higher levels of minute ventilation increased an estimated amount of airway thermal volume. The airway thermal volume produced by hyperventilation at minute ventilations of 559, 158 and 72 ml/min/kg was consistent with the gravimetric total lung mass, the blood-free wet lung weight and the extravascular lung water volume, respectively. The coefficient of lung thermal conductivity (KT), a practical index of the rate of heat conduction through tissue from lung vessels, was related to the ratio of the decrease in expired air temperature to minute ventilation, and estimated pulmonary blood flow was consistent with the thermodilution cardiac output. Pleural effusion had little effect on measurements of airway thermal volume and pulmonary blood flow. However, airway thermal volume and pulmonary blood flow showed increased variation in dogs with dextran-induced lung edema.

Received 17 August 1994; accepted in final form 17 May 1995.
APS Manuscript Number A871-4.
Article publication pending Journal of Applied Physiology.
ISSN 1080-4757 Copyright 1995 The American Physiological Society.
Published in APStracts on  8 June 1995.