Life at Thermal Energy

Biophysics and Medical Physics from the Cell to the Clinic in 8 chapters — from “The scales of life and the thermal energy” to “Echoes, precession and the therapeutic beam”.

Chapters

  1. The scales of life and the thermal energy
    • The cell census
    • Copy number
    • Thermal energy
    • The energy ledger
    • The timescale ladder
    • Surface-to-volume ratio
    • Problems
  2. Random walks, diffusion and the crowded cell
    • Brownian motion
    • The random walk
    • The diffusion coefficient
    • The Stokes-Einstein relation
    • Fick's first law
    • Tissue supply, Peclet number and Reynolds number
    • Macromolecular crowding
    • Problems
  3. Entropy, free energy and the forces that counting produces
    • The microstate count
    • Entropy
    • The Boltzmann factor
    • Free energy
    • Chemical potential
    • Osmotic pressure
    • Entropic spring and binding
    • Problems
  4. The membrane: barrier, capacitor and pump
    • The bilayer barrier and permeability
    • Ion gradients and the Nernst potential
    • Membrane capacitance and the charge deficit
    • Channel conductance
    • Active transport and its price
    • Cell volume regulation
    • Summary
    • Problems
  5. Bones, muscles, blood and body size
    • Joint statics and the joint reaction force
    • Bone stress and muscle scaling
    • Blood flow continuity
    • Poiseuille's law and turbulent blood flow
    • Allometric scaling and Kleiber's law
    • Summary
    • Problems
  6. Radiation in tissue: interaction, dose and risk
    • Ionising radiation and the energy ledger
    • Photon interactions and attenuation
    • Charged-particle range
    • Absorbed dose and equivalent dose
    • Cell survival and radiation risk
    • Summary
    • Problems
  7. Images from attenuation and from decay
    • X-ray production and the projection image
    • Poisson counting and quantum noise
    • Computed tomography and the Hounsfield unit
    • The decay law and the tracer principle
    • Gamma camera and positron emission tomography
    • Dose per examination
    • Problems
  8. Echoes, precession and the therapeutic beam
    • Pulse-echo imaging and acoustic impedance
    • Ultrasound attenuation and Doppler ultrasound
    • Larmor precession and nuclear spin polarisation
    • Relaxation contrast
    • Percentage depth dose and fractionation
    • Proton therapy
    • Problems