Introduction to Fractals.ppt

How fractals CHANGE the most basic ways we analyze and understand experimental data. Scaling The value measured depends on the resolution used to do the measurement. Fractal Kinetics 70 pS K+ ChannelCorneal Endothelium Fractal Approach Heart Rhythms Inter-event Times Episodes of Ventricular Tachycardia (v-tach) Patient #33 Patient #53 6 Patients Inter-arrival Times of E-mail Viruses E-mail Viruses E-mail Viruses Determining the PDFfrom a Histogram Determining the PDF Determiningthe PDF Summary of Fractal Properties Self-Simialrity Pieces resemble the whole. Summary of Fractal Properties Scaling The value measured depends on the resolution. Summary of Fractal Properties Statistical Properties Moments may be zero or infinite. 400 years ago: Gambling Problems Probability Theory 200 years ago: Statistics How we do experiments. 100 years ago: Student’s t-test, F-test, ANOVA Now: Still changing Fractals CHANGE the most basic ways we analyze and understand experimental data. References: Fractals and Chaos and Simplified for the Life Sciences Larry S. Liebovitch Oxford Univ. Press, 1998 This is the Sierpinski Triangle. In this mathematical object each little piece is an exact smaller copy of the whole object. The blood vessels in the retina are self-similar. The branching of the larger vessels is like the branching of the smaller vessels. The airways in the lung are self-similar. The branching of the larger airways is like the branching of the smaller airways. In real biologically objects like these, each little piece is not an exact copy of the whole object. It is kind-of-like the whole object. This is called Statistical Self-Similarity. Iannaccone and his colleagues study how organisms develop to understand and cure cancer in kids. They mix cells from another animal into an embryo so that the fate of these marker cells can be traced out as the animal develops. The cells that are added have a different enzyme which attaches to a radioactive m