Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Gas exchange is the physical process by which gases move passively by diffusion across a surface. For example, this surface might be the air/water interface of a water body, the surface of a gas bubble in a liquid, a gas-permeable membrane, or a biological membrane that forms the boundary between an organism and its extracellular environment.
The respiratory system (also respiratory apparatus, ventilatory system) is a biological system consisting of specific organs and structures used for gas exchange in animals and plants. The anatomy and physiology that make this happen varies greatly, depending on the size of the organism, the environment in which it lives and its evolutionary ...
A pulmonary alveolus (pl. alveoli; from Latin alveolus 'little cavity'), also called an air sac or air space, is one of millions of hollow, distensible cup-shaped cavities in the lungs where pulmonary gas exchange takes place. [1] Oxygen is exchanged for carbon dioxide at the blood–air barrier between the alveolar air and the pulmonary ...
Terminal bronchioles mark the end of the conducting division of air flow in the respiratory system while respiratory bronchioles are the beginning of the respiratory division where gas exchange takes place. The diameter of the bronchioles plays an important role in air flow. The bronchioles change diameter to either increase or reduce air flow.
Failure of the barrier may occur in a pulmonary barotrauma.This can be a result of several possible causes, including blast injury, swimming-induced pulmonary edema, and breathing gas entrapment or retention in the lung during depressurization, which can occur during ascent from underwater diving or loss of pressure from a pressurized vehicle, habitat or pressure suit.
Blood reaches from the pulmonary circulation into the lungs for gas exchange to oxygenate the rest of the body tissues. But bronchial circulation supplies fully oxygenated arterial blood to the lung tissues themselves. This blood supplies the bronchi and the pleurae to meet their nutritional requirements.
In physiology, respiration is the transport of oxygen from the outside environment to the cells within tissues, and the removal of carbon dioxide in the opposite direction to the environment by a respiratory system. [1] The physiological definition of respiration differs from the biochemical definition, which refers to a metabolic process by ...
Even without producing acute signs and symptoms, vascular gas bubbles can be an indicator of the magnitude of decompression stress, and as most dives where gas bubbles form only produce minimal symptoms, they may be useful as an indicator of the risk of injury in a particular dive, and therefore could be useful to help develop safer procedures.