Diffusion Reaction of Carbon Monoxide in the Human Lung

The capture of CO, a standard lung function test, results from diffusion-reaction processes of CO with hemoglobin inside red blood cells (RBCs). In its current understanding, suggested by Roughton and Forster in 1957, the capture is represented by two independent resistances in series, one for diffusion from the gas to the RBC periphery, the second for internal diffusion reaction. Numerical studies in 3D model structures described here contradict the independence hypothesis. This results from two different theoretical reasons: (i) The RBC peripheries are not equi-concentrations; (ii) diffusion times in series are not additive.