Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Fig. 3.6.
The pathway to fibrinolysis
possibly removing activated factors. The authors illustrate this concept by means
of numerical simulations. They refer mainly to FXa (entering the Prothrombinase
complex on the surface of activated platelets). This aspect can be rather interesting
in formulating a mathematical model.
3.3 Congenital bleeding disorders and the inadequacy of the
3-pathway Cascade model
We have placed the analysis of the drawbacks of the Cascade model in this section,
because the illustration of bleeding disorders is a valuable help in understanding the
reasons that led to its rejection. The shift to the cell-based model is too recent to
simply ignore the existence of the Cascade model, that has been used in mathema-
tical models till very recently. Diseases due to dysfunctions of the system regulating
blood coagulation have particular interest from the point of view of mathematical
modelling since a correct model for coagulation should also predict how specific
anomalies produce bleeding disorders. Despite the obvious interest of this subject,
our exposition will be extremely synthetic, because bleeding disorders are not the
main objective of the present review, though they can be a remarkable subject for
mathematical modelling.
3.3.1 Congenital bleeding disorders
Congenital bleeding disorders can be associated with the lack or deficiency of some
of the factors involved in blood coagulation. This fact provides a criterion to review
them. This is an impressively large chapter that we cannot treat extensively, nor
exhaustively. We will just go trough a synthetic and partial list.
