Buffering of Muscle Tissue PO2 Levels by the Superposition of the Oxygen Field from Many Capillaries

Abstract
Characteristic of a Krogh (1919, 1929) analysis is a polygonal array of cells with oxygen supplied by capillaries at each cell vertex. Because of the symmetry of the arrangement, the assignment of tissue PO2 at any point can be thought of as the consequence of one particular capillary in the array. Thus the PO2 distribution in an entire muscle tissue sample is reduced to the analysis of a single Krogh cylinder. The Krogh analysis predicts substantial PO2 variation radially across a muscle as well as longitudinally running parallel to the capillary.
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