Venous collapse is important during exercise, when muscular compression of leg veins is used to pump blood against gravity up to the heart, and in therapeutic compression of leg veins for the treatment of deep-vein thrombosis 
partial vessel collapse occurs in vessels which undergo conditions of higher external pressure relative to the fluid within and can be difficult to predict mathematically. As such, devices such as a Starling Resistor are often used to predict fluid flow under these conditions.
Fluid is forced through an elastically deforming tube which passes through a region of high external pressure causing a flattening of the tube depending on the relative pressures of the inside and outside of the tube.
In the absence of any flow (puD pd), an increase in pe generates a compressive stress in the tube wall causing it to buckle from a circular to an elliptic cross-section (except, of course, near its ends, where it is attached to the rigid tubes). Buckling to a shape with more than two lobes may arise in short, tethered, or inhomogeneous tubes. Once buckled, the tube becomes highly compliant so that small additional increases in pe lead to a substantial reduction in cross-sectional area ®. Further compression leads to contact of the opposite tube walls, first at a point, and then along a line (Figure 2, left); once in opposite-wall contact, the tube's compliance falls because strong bending forces in the tube wall at the bulbous end of each lobe provide an increasing resistance to area reductions. The “tube law,” the relation between transmural pressure P – Pexternal (where p is the internal pressure) and , for a long thin-walled tube can be approximated by thin-shell theory for an axially uniform elastic ring