Our purpose is to describe some recent progress in applying fractal concepts to systems of relevance to biology and medicine. We review several biological systems characterized by fractal geometry, with a particular focus on the long-range power-law correlations found recently in DNA sequences containing noncoding material. Furthermore, we discuss the finding that the exponent alpha quantifying...

INTRODUCTION Chronic insomnia is a disorder characterized by difficulty initiating or maintaining sleep along with effects on the waking functions such as mood and cognitive function. Chronic insomnia affects nearly 10% of the adult population. Current theoretical models of insomnia focus on homeostatic sleep-wake control mechanisms, hyper-arousal, and rapid eye movement (REM) instability; howe...

Analysis of highly iterated fractal antennas using integral equation methods is addressed in this paper. Time and memory requirements are greatly reduced taking advantage of the recursive structure of the fractal geometry.

Fractal geometry has been applied widely in the analysis of medical images to characterize the irregular complex tissue structures that do not lend themselves to straightforward analysis with traditional Euclidean geometry. In this study, we treat the nonfractal behaviour of medical images over large-scale ranges by considering their box-counting fractal dimension as a scale-dependent parameter...

We analyzed published measurements of the bronchial circulation and airway wall (Anderson JC, Bernard SL, Luchtel DL, Babb AL, and Hlastala MP. Respir Physiol Neurobiol 132: 329-339, 2002) and determined that the radial distribution of bronchial capillary cross-sectional area was fractal. We limited our analysis to bronchial capillaries, diameter < or =10 mum, that resided between the epithelia...