Transport of O2 from arterioles

Oxygen delivery to the tissues is crucial to survival but our understanding of the processes involved in the transport of oxygen from blood to tissue is incomplete. The aim of the present work is to illustrate a long-standing paradox regarding such transport by reporting new state-of-the-art measurements and by analyzing the results in several ways, thereby exploring possible resolutions of the paradox. Our model calculations show that slight extensions of system parameters are sufficient to overcome the apparent inconsistencies. Alternatively, so far unappreciated mild effects like flow-assisted diffusion in the interstitium will explain the supernormal diffusion of oxygen.