title: Fractals in biology and medicine.
abstract: 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 these long-range correlations ("fractal complexity") is smaller for coding than for noncoding sequences. We also discuss the application of fractal scaling analysis to the dynamics of heartbeat regulation, and report the recent finding that the normal heart is characterized by long-range "anticorrelations" which are absent in the diseased heart.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, Boston University, MA, USA.
authors.forename: S
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Havlin
authors.forename: S V
authors.initials: SV
authors.lastname: Buldyrev
authors.forename: A L
authors.initials: AL
authors.lastname: Goldberger
authors.forename: R N
authors.initials: RN
authors.lastname: Mantegna
authors.forename: S M
authors.initials: SM
authors.lastname: Ossadnik
authors.forename: C K
authors.initials: CK
authors.lastname: Peng
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Simons
authors.forename: H E
authors.initials: HE
authors.lastname: Stanley
mesh_terms: D005075:Biological Evolution; D001695:Biology; D017709:Fractals; D006339:Heart Rate / Q000502:physiology; D008511:Medicine; D015233:Models, Statistical; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D009146:Music; D017422:Sequence Analysis, DNA