The natural complexity of the brain, its hierarchical structure, and the sophisticated topological architecture of the neurons organized in micronetworks and macronetworks are all factors contributing to the limits of the application of Euclidean geometry and linear dynamics to the neurosciences. The introduction of fractal geometry for the quantitative analysis and description of the geometric complexity of natural systems has been a major paradigm shift in the last decades. Nowadays, modern neurosciences admit the prevalence of fractal properties such as self-similarity in the brain at various levels of observation, from the microscale to the macroscale, in molecular, anatomic, functional, and pathological perspectives. Fractal geometry is a mathematical model that offers a universal language for the quantitative description of neurons and glial cells as well as the brain as a whole, with its complex three-dimensional structure, in all its physiopathological spectrums. For a holistic view of fractal geometry of the brain, we review here the basic concepts of fractal analysis and its main applications to the basic neurosciences.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1073858413513927 | DOI Listing |
PLoS One
January 2025
Department of Basic Sciences, Preparatory Year, King Faisal University, Al-Ahsa, Saudi Arabia.
Our study presents a novel orbit with s-convexity, for illustration of the behavior shift in the fractals. We provide a theorem to demonstrate the escape criterion for transcendental cosine functions of the type Tα,β(u) = cos(um)+αu + β, for [Formula: see text] and m ≥ 2. We also demonstrate the impact of the parameters on the formatted fractals with numerical examples and graphical illustrations using the MATHEMATICA software, algorithm, and colormap.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Neural Eng
January 2025
Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences, Universidad Nacional de San Martin Escuela de Ciencia Y Tecnologia, 25 de Mayo y Francia, San Martín, Buenos Aires, 1650, ARGENTINA.
Objective Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), functional MRI (fMRI) and other neuroimaging techniques are routinely used in medical diagnosis, cognitive neuroscience or recently in brain decoding. They produce three- or four-dimensional scans reflecting the geometry of brain tissue or activity, which is highly correlated temporally and spatially. While there exist numerous theoretically guided methods for analyzing correlations in one-dimensional data, they often cannot be readily generalized to the multidimensional geometrically embedded setting.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPLoS One
December 2024
School of Geoscience and Technology, Southwest Petroleum University, Chengdu, China.
Clarifying the pore-throat size and pore size distribution of tight sandstone reservoirs, quantitatively characterizing the heterogeneity of pore-throat structures, is crucial for evaluating reservoir effectiveness and predicting productivity. Through a series of rock physics experiments including gas measurement of porosity and permeability, casting thin sections, scanning electron microscopy, and high-pressure mercury injection, the quality of reservoir properties and microscopic pore-throat structure characteristics were systematically studied. Combined with fractal geometry theory, the effects of different pore throat types, geometric shapes and scale sizes on the fractal characteristics and heterogeneity of sandstone pore throat structure are clarified.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInvest Ophthalmol Vis Sci
November 2024
Department of Internal Medicine, Healthcare Research Institute, Seoul National University Hospital Healthcare System Gangnam Center, Seoul, Republic of Korea.
Purpose: To elucidate the mechanism underlying changes in choroidal metrics (choroidal thickness [CT], choroidal vascularity index [CVI], and choriocapillaris [CC] flow deficit [FD]) observed in diabetic retinopathy (DR) and examine the association of choroidal metrics with both retinal vessel geometry and optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA) metrics.
Methods: Overall, 133 eyes of 133 patients were analyzed retrospectively. Retinal vessel geometry parameters were assessed using semiautomated software.
Adv Exp Med Biol
November 2024
Computational NeuroSurgery (CNS) Lab, Macquarie Medical School, Faculty of Medicine, Human and Health Sciences, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia.
Fractal geometry is a branch of mathematics used to characterize and quantify the geometrical complexity of natural objects, with many applications in different fields, including physics, astronomy, geology, meteorology, finances, social sciences, and computer graphics. In the biomedical sciences, the use of fractal parameters has allowed the introduction of novel morphometric parameters, which have been shown to be useful to characterize any biomedical images as well as any time series within different domains of applications. Specifically, in the neurosciences and neurosurgery, the use of the fractal dimension and other computationally inferred fractal parameters has offered robust morphometric quantitators to characterize the brain in its wholeness, from neurons to the cortical structure and connections, and introduced new prognostic, diagnostic, and eventually therapeutic markers of many diseases of neurosurgical interest, including brain tumors and cerebrovascular malformations, as summarized in this chapter.
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