A two-compartment kinetic model for assessing dialysis dose in chronic hemodialysis patients

This paper reports the results of a kinetic study aimed at quantifying the efficiency of urea removal during a hemodialysis treatment. A mathematical model considering the distribution of urea into a constant-volume intracellular space and a variable-volume extracellular compartment was developed. The model was validated on a set of 68 dialysis sessions referring to 9 chronically dialyzed patients. Estimates of extracellular urea concentrations were accurate within ± 3%. The model was also used to calculate the urea reduction ratio and to compare predictions with those obtained by the single-pool model.
The results indicated that the delivered dialysis dose can be significantly overestimated (up to 20%) if compartment effects are not considered.