title: Scaling, growth and cyclicity in biology: a new computational approach.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  The Phenomenological Universalities approach has been developed by P.P. Delsanto and collaborators during the past 2-3 years. It represents a new tool for the analysis of experimental datasets and cross-fertilization among different fields, from physics/engineering to medicine and social sciences. In fact, it allows similarities to be detected among datasets in totally different fields and acts upon them as a magnifying glass, enabling all the available information to be extracted in a simple way. In nonlinear problems it allows the nonscaling invariance to be retrieved by means of suitable redefined fractal-dimensioned variables.
  
  
  RESULTS
  The main goal of the present contribution is to extend the applicability of the new approach to the study of problems of growth with cyclicity, which are of particular relevance in the fields of biology and medicine.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  As an example of its implementation, the method is applied to the analysis of human growth curves. The excellent quality of the results (R2 = 0.988) demonstrates the usefulness and reliability of the approach.
authors.affiliation: Dept, Physics, Politecnico di Torino, Corso Duca degli Abruzzi 24, 10129 Torino, Italy. pier.delsanto@polito.it
authors.forename: Pier Paolo
authors.initials: PP
authors.lastname: Delsanto
authors.forename: Antonio S
authors.initials: AS
authors.lastname: Gliozzi
authors.forename: Caterina
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Guiot
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000465:Algorithms; D001695:Biology / Q000379:methods; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods*; D003198:Computer Simulation; D017709:Fractals; D006128:Growth; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007231:Infant, Newborn; D015233:Models, Statistical; D017711:Nonlinear Dynamics; D012984:Software