Mathematical Modeling of Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation

The cardiopulmonary resuscitation procedure (CPR) is a widely used procedure for resuscitating cardiac arrest patients. Many physiological aspects of the procedure are not yet well understood. The first step for understanding and modeling such a complicated procedure is to develop an accurate model of mechanical properties of the chest during CPR. In this paper we propose a novel nonlinear model of the chest that captures the complex behavior of the chest during CPR. The proposed model consists of nonlinear elasticity and nonlinear damping along with frequency dependent hysteresis. We use an optimization technique to estimate the model coefficients for force-compression data collected from careful experiments conducted on swine. The results show excellent agreement.