Home▸Medical Technology & Imaging Physics▸The Baroreflex: How the Body Keeps Blood Pressure in Balance

🩺 The Baroreflex: How the Body Keeps Blood Pressure in Balance

Explore the baroreflex, the fast negative-feedback loop where stretch-sensitive baroreceptors in the carotid sinus and aortic arch detect blood pressure changes and trigger second-by-second corrections to heart rate and vessel tone.

Medical Technology & Imaging Physics3DModerate60 FPS

The simulation shows arterial pressure perturbing baroreceptor firing rate in real time, tracing how the brainstem's error signal splits into vagal and sympathetic commands that pull heart rate and vessel tone back toward a defended set point within one to two heartbeats.

🔬 What It Demonstrates

🎮 How to Use

Trigger a pressure disturbance such as standing up or a hemorrhage event, adjust the baroreflex gain (sensitivity) slider to see stronger or weaker correction, and watch the firing-rate, heart-rate, and blood-pressure traces settle back toward the 120/80 mmHg target.

💡 Did You Know?

Carotid sinus baroreceptor signals were first shown to control blood pressure in the 1920s by Heinrich Ewald Hering and Corneille Heymans, work that earned Heymans the 1938 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, decades before the reflex arc's millisecond-scale timing could be directly measured.

⚙ Under the hood

baroreflexblood pressure regulationnegative feedbackautonomic nervous systemphysiologymedtechcardiovascular

3D · Three.js / WebGL renderer · 60 FPS target · runs fully client-side, no install