TITLE:
On the Fractal Design in Human Brain and Nervous Tissue
AUTHORS:
Gabriele A. Losa
KEYWORDS:
Complexity, Fractal Dimension, Self-Similarity, Healthy and Diseased Brain Tissues
JOURNAL NAME:
Applied Mathematics,
Vol.5 No.12,
June
26,
2014
ABSTRACT: Digital imaging techniques have enabled to gain insight into complex
structure-functional processes involved in the neo-cortex maturation and in
brain development, already recognized in anatomical and histological
preparations. Despite such a refined technical progress most diagnostic records
sound still elusive and unreliable because of use of conventional morphometric
approaches based on a unique scale of measure, inadequate for investigating
irregular cellular components and structures which shape nervous and brain
tissues. Instead, these could be efficiently analyzed by adopting principles
and methodologies derived from the Fractal Geometry. Through his masterpiece, The Fractal Geometry of Nature [1], Benoît
Mandelbrot has provided a novel epistemological framework for interpreting the
real life and the natural world as they are, preventing whatever approximation
or subjective sight. Founded upon a body of well-defined laws and coherent
principles, the Fractal Geometry is a powerful tool for recognizing and
quantitatively describing a good many kinds of complex shapes, living forms,
organized patterns, and morphologic features long range correlated with a broad
network of functional interactions and metabolic processes that contribute to
building up adaptive responses making life sustainable. Scale free dynamics
characterized biological systems which develop through the iteration of single
generators on different scales thus preserving proper self-similar traits. In
the last decades several studies have contributed to showing how relevant may
be the recognition of fractal properties for a better understanding of brain
and nervous tissues either in healthy conditions or in altered and pathological
states.