Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

Critical care is a branch of medicine concerned with the provision of life support or organ support systems in patients who are critically ill and require intensive monitoring. Such monitoring allows us to collect massive amounts of data (usually at the level of organ dynamics, such as electrocardiogram, but recently also at the level of genes). In my talk I’ll show several examples of how ideas from nonlinear dynamics and statistical physics can be applied for the analysis of these data in order to understand and eventually predict physiologic status of critically ill patients: (1) Heart beats, respiration and blood pressure variations can be viewed as a dynamics of a system of coupled nonlinear oscillators (heart, lungs, vessels). From this perspective, a live support devise (e.g. mechanical ventilator used to support breathing) acts as an external driving force on one of the oscillators (lungs). I’ll show that mechanical ventilator entrances the dynamics of whole cardiovascular system and leads to phase synchronization between respiration and heart beats. (2) Then I’ll discuss how fluctuation-dissipation theorem can be used in order to predict heart rate relaxation after a stress (e.g. treadmill exercise test) from the heart rate fluctuations during the stress. (3) Finally, I’ll demonstrate that phase space dynamics of leukocyte gene expression during critical illness and recovery has an attractor state, associated with immunological health.