A novel approach to the analysis of human growth.

Objectives: Several formulations have been proposed in order to model human growth from birth to maturity. They are usually based on "ad hoc" heuristic assumptions. In the present contribution we adopt, as an alternative, a completely general (interdisciplinary) approach, based on the formalism of the Phenomenological Universalities (PUN).

Phenomenological universalities: a novel tool for the analysis of dynamic contrast enhancement in magnetic resonance imaging.

Dynamic contrast enhancement in magnetic resonance imaging (DCE-MRI) is a promising tool for the clinical diagnosis of tumors, whose implementation may be improved through the use of suitable hemodynamic models. If one prefers to avoid assumptions about the tumor physiology, empirical fitting functions may be adopted. For this purpose, in this paper we discuss the exploitation of a recently proposed phenomenological universalities (PUN) formalism.

Oscillations in growth of multicellular tumour spheroids: a revisited quantitative analysis.

Objectives: Multicellular tumour spheroids (MTS) provide an important tool for study of the microscopic properties of solid tumours and their responses to therapy. Thus, observation of large-scale volume oscillations in MTS, reported several years ago by two independent groups (1,2), in our opinion represent a remarkable discovery, particularly if this could promote careful investigation of the possible occurrence of volume oscillations of tumours 'in vivo'.

Materials And Methods: Because of high background noise, quantitative analysis of properties of observed oscillations has not been possible in previous studies.

Concurrent growth of phenotypic features: a phenomenological universalities approach.

Different physical features of an organism are often measured concurrently, because their correlations can be used as predictors of longevity, future health, or adaptability to an ecological niche. Since, in general, we do not know a priori if the temporal variations in the measured quantities are causally related, it may be useful to have a method that could help us to identify possible correlations and to obtain parameters that may vary from population to population. In this paper we develop a procedure that may detect underlying relationships.

A new computational tool for the phenomenological analysis of multipassage tumor growth curves.

Multipassage experiments are performed by subcutaneous implantation in lab animals (usually mice) of a small number of cells from selected human lines. Tumor cells are then passaged from one mouse to another by harvesting them from a growing tumor and implanting them into other healthy animals. This procedure may be extremely useful to investigate the various mechanisms involved in the long term evolution of tumoral growth.