Study of a regional circulatory system based on the "equivalent tube" concept: the feto-placental circulation.

The fluid-dynamical description of a regional circulatory system, based on the numerical solution of the dynamical equations applied to an equivalent tube is proposed. The feto-placental circulation is explicitly studied with this technique as an example, and results are discussed and compared with experimental data. The original features of this work are the quantitative description of the terminal load of the vascular system on the basis of morphological data and the attention paid to the formulation of physiologically sensible boundary conditions for the dynamical equations.