On The Fractal Language Of Medicine

On the Fractal Language of Medicine bridges a very clear gap among the knowledge gained over the last 20 years in the physical and life sciences on network theory, organ synchronicity and communication, the understanding of fractal signatures in health and disease and the importance of fractional calculus in integrating these concepts. The authors opine that the field of medicine has not appreciated this hard-won knowledge and has suffered greatly as a result. This book addresses this perceived deficiency by introducing medical researchers, clinicians, residents, first-year medical students and members of allied fields to the work of the so-called hard sciences. It seeks to facilitate effective communication between empiricists and theorists by making interdisciplinary efforts to explain complex mathematical concepts to physicians and, equally important, to elucidate complex medical concepts to physicists or mathematicians. This book will be of great interest to medical students, professionals and academics, as well as students and researchers of applied mathematics, especially those interested in fractional calculus and fractals.

In March 2000 leading scientists gathered at the Centro Seminariale Monte Verità, Ascona, Switzerland, for the Third International Symposium on "Fractals 2000 in Biology and Medicine". This interdisciplinary conference provided stimulating contributions from the very topical field Fractals in Biology and Medicine. This volume highlights the growing power and efficacy of the fractal geometry in understanding how to analyze living phenomena and complex shapes.

This exceptional book is concerned with the application of fractals and chaos, as well as other concepts from nonlinear dynamics to biomedical phenomena. Herein we seek to communicate the excitement being experienced by scientists upon making application of these concepts within the life sciences. Mathematical concepts are introduced using biomedical data sets and the phenomena being explained take precedence over the mathematics. In this new edition what has withstood the test of time has been updated and modernized; speculations that were not borne out have been expunged and the breakthroughs that have occurred in the intervening years are emphasized. The book provides a comprehensive overview of a nascent theory of medicine, including a new chapter on the theory of complex networks as they pertain to medicine.

This book describes a new strategy for rehabilitation from injury and/or disease using Crucial Event Therapy. Recent studies have shown that individuals can recuperate more rapidly from surgery and other invasive procedures intended to correct the negative effects of disease or injury through the use of life support systems that operate at the body's natural biofrequencies. The same observation has been clinically shown to reverse the degenerative effects of neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer's Disease. Crucial Event Therapy describes medicine as the operational control of the functions of the human body treated as a network-of-networks, with 1/f-variable crucial events coding the dynamic states of health and disease through information flow within a network and information exchange between biomedical networks. A new way of thinking based on the statistics of Cortical Events is presented and the relevant literature is suitably referenced. This is an ideal book for biophysicists and data scientists seeking to understand the connection of complexity measures for the study of consciousness with the clinical aspects of designing a rehabilitation strategy.

Fractal analysis has entered a new era. The applications to different areas of knowledge have been surprising. Benoit Mandelbrot, creator of fractal geometry, would have been surprised by the use of fractal analysis presented in this book. Here we present the use of fractal geometry, in particular, fractal analysis in two sciences: health sciences and social sciences and humanities. Part 1 is Health Science. In it, we present the latest advances in cardiovascular signs, kidney images to determine cancer growth, EEG signals, magnetoencephalography signals, and photosensitive epilepsy. We show how it is possible to produce ultrasonic lenses or even sound focusing. In Part 2, we present the use of fractal analysis in social sciences and humanities. It includes anthropology, hierarchical scaling, human settlements, language, fractal dimension of different cultures, cultural traits, and Mesoamerican complexity. And in Part 3, we present a few useful tools for fractal analysis, such as graphs and correlation, self-affine and self-similar graphs, and correlation function. It is impossible to picture today's research without fractal geometry.

A deeply detailed discussion of fractals in biology, heterogeneous chemistry, polymers, and the earth sciences. Beginning with a general introduction to fractal geometry it continues with eight chapters on self-organized criticality, rough surfaces and interfaces, random walks, chemical reactions, and fractals in chemisty, biology, and medicine. A special chapter entitled "Computer Exploration of Fractals, Chaos, and Cooperativity" presents computer demonstrations of fractal models: 14 programs are included on a 3 1/2" MS-DOS diskette which run on any PC with at least 1 MB RAM and a EGA or VGA graphics card, 16 colors.

This volume is number four in a series of proceedings volumes from the International Symposia on Fractals in Biology and Medicine in Ascona, Switzerland which have been inspired by the work of Benoît Mandelbrot seeking to extend the concepts towards the life sciences. It highlights the potential that fractal geometry offers for elucidating and explaining the complex make-up of cells, tissues and biological organisms either in normal or in pathological conditions.

This text describes the statistcal behavior of complex systems and shows how the fractional calculus can be used to model the behavior. The discussion emphasizes physical phenomena whose evolution is best described using the fractional calculus, such as systems with long-range spatial interactions or long-time memory. The book gives general strategies for understanding wave propagation through random media, the nonlinear response of complex materials, and the fluctuations of heat transport in heterogeneous materials.

"Fractals in Biology and Medicine" explores the potential of fractal geometry for describing and understanding biological organisms, their development and growth as well as their structural design and functional properties. It extends these notions to assess changes associated with disease in the hope to contribute to the understanding of pathogenetic processes in medicine. The book is the first comprehensive presentation of the importance of the new concept of fractal geometry for biological and medical sciences. It collates in a logical sequence extended papers based on invited lectures and free communications presented at a symposium in Ascona, Switzerland, attended by leading scientists in this field, among them the originator of fractal geometry, Benoit Mandelbrot. "Fractals in Biology and Medicine" begins by asking how the theoretical construct of fractal geometry can be applied to biomedical sciences and then addresses the role of fractals in the design and morphogenesis of biological organisms as well as in molecular and cell biology. The consideration of fractal structure in understanding metabolic functions and pathological changes is a particularly promising avenue for future research.