Artificial Liver Devices: A Chemical Engineering Analysis

All the most widely used liver support devices implement the same elementary unit operations, mainly membrane separation and adsorption, to remove albumin-bound toxins. Mathematical modeling of these operations is a well-consolidated knowledge of chemical engineering, and the evaluation of the performance of these apparatus can be confidently carried out once equilibrium conditions and transport phenomena kinetics are known. In this work, a device-focused analysis of liver support devices is presented, with the aim of providing a framework for the quantitative and semiquantitative assessment of their performance. The analysis is based on simple mathematical models of the single unit operations implemented in the detoxification processes. A preliminary validation of the models against data obtained during a clinical molecular adsorbent recirculating system (MARS) session, and referring to bilirubin detoxification was performed; the results showed that the models used are consistent and possess a very good order-of-magnitude prediction capability. (C) 2010 Curtin University of Technology and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.