Objectives: 

The analogue records of perfused vascular segment responses allow to evaluate the standard parameters of contraction and relaxation as well as the digital ones. Our methodology enables to calculate new model parameters of vessel reactivity, not yet assessed. To analyse computer-based parameters of digitally recorded contractile responses of perfused rat arterial segments in comparison with parameters available by conventional descriptive evaluation.

Materials: 

Segments of renal arteries of control and diabetic rats were subjected to series of contractions induced by successively increasing bolus doses of noradrenaline (0.1; 0.5; 1; 3; 6; 10 μg). Finally, after precontraction there was induced a relaxation by single bolus dose of acetylcholine (20 μg). Further, the digitally recorded contractile responses were processed by computational modelling using methods Levy and Monte Carlo.

Results: 

We found out an apparent reduction of relaxatory responses in the diabetic group compared to controls. Evaluation of contractile responses by the descriptive methods did not reveal significant differences between groups at any used dose of noradrenaline. In contrast, modelling of the responses by the appropriate software procedures allows calculations of the characteristic parameters, which in our study indicated a significant increase of the sensitivity of arterial segments and the value of Akaike information criteria in the diabetic group of animals compared with the control group

Conclusions: 

Software design proposed for measuring, recording and computational modelling of perfused artery contractile responses meets the expectations of accuracy and high reproducibility of data extraction. Thus it seems to be a new approach and promising improvement over recent routine methods.

Acknowledgement: 

Financial support by the grants VEGA SR Nr. 1/0314/08 and Nr. 1/0501/11 is gratefully acknowledged.