Speaker
Description
Asthma is a chronic lung disease of reversible airway constriction. Imaging experiments show that during an asthma attack, the asthmatic's lung exhibits what is known as clustered ventilation defects, which is the hallmark trait of asthma. This phenomenon is when there are some regions of the lung where the airways are closed, and some regions where they are open. These clusters vary from event to event, even in the same patient, and thus it is believed that the causes are dynamic rather than structural. We want to understand the dynamic mechanisms behind the physiological implications. Different mechanisms leading to spatial clustering have been suggested; we are interested in assessing the physiological viability of some of these models, particularly with how each model exhibits this spatial clustering. During this talk, we will go over these models and how they have shown themselves to be different in the dynamics analysis.
