Automatic control of mean arterial pressure based on a baroreflex-feedback cardiovascular model

Abstract

The automatic regulation problem of the mean arterial pressure (MAP) was considered in this work. In a first step, a two-compartment cardiovascular system model endowed with a baroreflex-feedback scheme was developed. The cardiac output was proposed as the regulated output of the baroreflex, and the MAP was left as an internal variable that can vary without regulation. In this way, significant mean arterial pressure levels can be achieved as a response to, e.g., increased peripheral resistance. It was shown that hypertension cannot be regulated by variations of the heart rhythm, being essentially a peripheral problem. In a second step, a three-compartment model of drug infusion dynamics was developed to propose a scheme for automatic MAP regulation. The resulting system couples the cardiovascular dynamics to the MAP pressure, and numerical simulations showed that a simple integral compensation scheme sufficed to regulate both the cardiac output and the MAP at prescribed values despite disturbances. The results of this work provided some insights into the dynamics of the MAP resulting from the cardiovascular system and the viability of simple compensators to regulate the system operation.