Basic transport phenomena in biomedical engineering
R.L. Fournier. Taylor & Francis, Philadelphia
ISBN 1-56032-708-1, 1998, 312 pages, £57.95
This book has been written as a text for students entering the field of biomedical engineering and aims to introduce them to the basic physiological and engineering concepts of transfer processes in biological and artificial systems. The reader is first introduced to transport in biological systems with chapters on the physical properties of tissue and blood, solute transport by the microcirculation, oxygen transport in tissues and pharmacokinetic analysis. The second half of the book is an introduction to extracorporeal devices, tissue engineering and bioartificial organs. Throughout the book there is a strong emphasis on problem solving with numerous examples, most presented as Mathcad charts, and each chapter ends with a number of problems.
The task the author has set himself is a difficult one, requiring introductory sections in many different disciplines, and with such a broad canvas it is understandable that some of the brush strokes are broader than the specialist would prefer. It is clear that the emphasis is on getting 'answers' and, particularly in the sections on biological tissues, the complexities of the physical processes are sometimes sacrificed for the sake of empirical relationships.
Conservation laws are developed through the formalism of 'shell balance equations' that, to a fluid dynamicist, seem to be slightly less general than the more familiar 'control volume' approach. I could not, for example, see how this approach could cope with temporal changes in the shape of the shell. However, for the examples covered in the text (and to be fair most of the problems encountered in practice) the two approaches are the same and I suspect that the author's approach is more intuitively obvious to a student confronting the concept for the first time. The problems with the author's approach are manifest in the sections dealing with fluid flow that are devoid of any momentum equations, probably because of the difficulty in expressing the conservation of momentum in the chosen formalism. Instead, a 'Bernoulli' equation for viscous flow is presented following Bird, Stewart and Lightfoot1 without their warning that 'historically this nomenclature has been reserved for the corresponding equation for frictionless fluids'. This and the Hagen-Poiseuille equation for steady, fully developed flow in rigid circular tubes do not fairly represent either the complexity or the current state of understanding of fluid flow in the body.
There is, I believe, a particular onus on writers of textbooks to think carefully about their notation because it can influence a whole generation of students. At times in this book, the author uses clumsy and occasionally misleading notation.
If is 
standard notation
in the pharmocokinetic literature for 'area under the curve as t goes from 0 to
infinity', I would suggest that it is time to think of a more felicitous
terminology. As an example of misleading notation, consider the following
equation, also from the chapter on pharmocokinetic analysis,
where the linearity of the equation is obscured by the use of CLrenal for
'renal clearance'. In general, however, the mathematical sections of the book
are clearly laid out with precise definitions of parameters and variables.
Unfortunately, the same is not true of the figures, which are obviously
derived from many different sources and are very uneven in quality. The best are
very good and add considerably to the discussion, the worst are sketchy in
detail and even occasionally misleading. I would hate to think of a generation
of biomedical engineers thinking that red blood cells look like ice hockey pucks
and that rouleaux are a fraction of the size of a single red blood cell as
Figure 3.1 implies.
Overall, I would recommend that anyone teaching a biomedical engineering course on transport consider this book seriously when choosing texts. It has some deficiencies, particularly in its treatment of traditional fluid mechanics, but it does a commendable job of introducing the very wide range of topics with which a bioengineer must be familiar. Specialists may also find this book interesting. I certainly found much of the discussion of subjects outside of my speciality fascinating, although I suspect that they, like me, may find the discussion of their particular field frustratingly superficial. This is probably inevitable in a introductory text, particularly one as wide ranging as this.
K H Parker
1 Bird RB, Stewart WE and Lightfoot EN (1960) Transport Phenomena, John Wiley & Sons, N.Y.,Section 7.3