Artificial liver support systems: A patient-device model

Many efforts have been carried out for over 40 years in the attempt to design liver support devices suitable for a temporary clinical use, either to bridge the patients to liver transplantation or to help to keep them alive until the recovery of native liver function. Really, a deeper knowledge of the physicochemical basis of their functioning is essential to ‘engineer’ these devices, that is, to design new artificial liver devices, to optimize the existing ones and to taylor the patient treatment on his clinical state. In this framework, this work has been finalized to obtain a mathematical model of the whole patient-artificial device system as useful tool for a chemical engineering point of view analysis. © 2014 Curtin University of Technology and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.