Physics for Anesthesiologists

Antonio Pisano is staff anesthesiologist and intensivist at the Cardiac Anesthesia and Intensive Care Unit of the Monaldi High Specialty and University Hospital, A.O. “Dei Colli”, Naples, Italy. His many scientific contributions include, among others, papers published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, Critical Care Medicine, Anesthesia & Analgesia, and the American Heart Journal. He is author of several book chapters in the field of anesthesiology, critical care medicine, and non-invasive ventilation, including a chapter of the 7th edition of the renowned Kaplan’s Cardiac Anesthesia. He is also co-editor of the book “Reducing Mortality in Acute Kidney Injury” published by Springer in 2016. Currently, he is principal investigator in several multicenter randomized trials and he collaborates with various international journals as a reviewer. Of course, he is also a great physics enthusiast!

• Preface.- Part I. Gases, bubbles and surroundings.- Perfect coffee and oxygen cylinders: the ideal gas law.- Boats, balloons, and air bubbles: Archimedes’ principle.- Air bubbles in the blood sample: better or worse oxygenation? Dalton’s law and Fick’s law .- Cold, sparkling drinks, and blood gas analysis: Henry’s law.- Bubbles, tracheal tube cuffs, and reservoir bags: surface tension and Laplace’s law.- Part II. Fluids in motion: masks, tubes, and hemodynamics.- The Venturi mask works like an airplane: Bernoulli’s theorem.- From tubes and catheters to the basis of hemodynamics: the Hagen–Poiseuille equation.- Part III. Hemodynamic monitoring.- Toothpaste, sea deeps, and invasive pressure monitoring: Stevin’s law and Pascal’s principle.- Heat, cardiac output, and what is the future: laws of thermodynamics.- Part IV. Forces in action.- Doors, steering wheels, and central venous catheters: the moment of a force (torque).- Friction, trigonometry, and Newton’s laws: all about Trendelenburg position.- Part V. Inhalation anesthesia.- Why a vaporizer is not exactly a vaporizer and why it weighs so much: saturated vapor pressure and heat of vaporization.- Thermal expansion: train tracks, thermostats and, again, vaporizers.- The voice of xenon: origin and propagation of sound.- Part VI. Electromagnetic waves.- Light, air pollution and pulse oximetry: the Beer-Lambert law.- Cerebral oximetry and why the sky is blue: Rayleigh scattering.- Catch me if you can: X-ray, Compton scattering and the inverse square law.- Part VII. Now we exaggerate.- Activated clotting time and… A brief look at the theory of relativity.

“Antoni Pisano provides a lot of useful information about physics in general and applied physics in anesthesia and critical care in specific. … this book is a perfect match for both junior residents and experienced staff members. One may read it for pleasure and enjoy the funny examples or use it to quickly review some formulas. It may be a good companion for both the couch at home and the operating room.” (Peter Markus Spieth, Anesthesia & Analgesia, Vol. 127 (2), August, 2018)