Digital computer studies of respiratory control

One of the major shortcomings of models of the respiratory control system to date has been the lack of experimental verification of the validity of the models, primarily because of the lack of or inadequacy of such experimental information in the literature. For this reason, we set out to obtain experimental data for a variety of situations to be used by ourselves and by others for developing and verifying the validity of models of the respiratory control system. In one of these experimental studies the input to the system was considered to be the inspired carbon dioxide concentration and the outputs to be alveolar Pco2, tidal volume, respiratory frequency and minute ventilation. Some of the results of this study will be presented in the following paragraphs. In addition, a brief example of the use of such data in developing a model of ventilatory control will be presented.