Renormalized random walk study of oxygen absorption in the human lung.

The possibility to renormalize random walks is used to study numerically the oxygen diffusion and permeation in the acinus, the diffusion cell terminating the mammalian airway tree. This is done in a 3D tree structure which can be studied from its topology only. The method is applied to the human acinus real morphology as studied by Haefeli-Bleuer and Weibel in order to compute the respiratory efficiency of the human lung. It provides the first quantitative evidence of the role of diffusion screening in real 3D mammalian respiration. The net result of this study is that, at rest, the efficiency of the human acinus is only of order 33%. Application of these results to CO2 clearance provides for the first time a theoretical support to the empirical relation between the O2 and CO2 partial pressures in blood.