Surprisingly, these effects are caused by self-organizing mechanisms as they are known from chaotic systems. The simulation of the complex interactions within the airway tree during an asthma attack provided an explanation for changes in ventilation that were obtained experimentally using Positron Emission Tomography. This approach of integrative physiology links knowledge at the organ level with knowledge at the microscopic level. But neither the knowledge at the organ level nor at the microscopic level could predict the complex behavior within the airway tree that the integrative model reveals.
The supplementary material contains very interesting movies that show the dramatic change in a subject’s ventilation during an asthma attack and how ventilation changes in the model.