Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)This book is not very interesting unless you are a freshman math major who has a subtle interest in physiology. The book more or less is a set of derivations and cute math tricks despite the fact it was designed to teach concepts of physiological modeling. I had this book as the focus of a biomedical engineering graduate class, and it's not very useful for that. Probably 3/4 of the questions in the back of each chapter could be summarized as "plug (some value) into (some equation). What is the answer?" They do the thinking for you and then ask you to regurgitate a formula or plug and chug. It doesn't demand any understanding of the material to answer most of the questions. There is almost no design or medical treatment choices involved--you are just studying something for the sake of studying it. The math tricks and derivations are really the focus of the book, rather than the actual conservation principles or physiology concepts that the models are based on. Assumptions are explained, but often the alternatives or models actually used in the field are not discussed at all. Finally, the MATLAB code that is included is rather poor. None of the graphs have titles or labeled axes, so in order to run a simulation, you must first dig through the code for an hour to figure out what each of the plots is. They also use up to 8 or so different files for simulations, which is rather silly. Most of the stuff they're doing can be done cleanly in no more than 4 documents. There is very little commenting in the book code which makes it all the more time-consuming to follow.
It might be a decent reference book for understanding some basic modeling principles, but that's about all.
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The result of lectures given by the authors at New York University, the University of Utah, and Michigan State University, the material is written for students who have had only one term of calculus, but it contains material that can be used in modeling courses in applied mathematics at all levels through early graduate courses. Numerous exercises are given as well as solutions to selected exercises, so as to lead readers to discover interesting extensions of that material. Throughout, illustrations depict physiological processes, population biology phenomena, corresponding models, and the results of computer simulations. Topics covered range from population phenomena to demographics, genetics, epidemics and dispersal; in physiological processes, including the circulation, gas exchange in the lungs, control of cell volume, the renal counter-current multiplier mechanism, and muscle mechanics; to mechanisms of neural control. Each chapter is graded in difficulty, so a reading of the first parts of each provides an elementary introduction to the processes and their models.
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