Peng C K, Buldyrev S V, Hausdorff J M, Havlin S, Mietus J E, Simons M, Stanley H E, Goldberger A L
Harvard Medical School, Beth Israel Hospital, Boston, MA 02215.
Integr Physiol Behav Sci. 1994 Jul-Sep;29(3):283-93. doi: 10.1007/BF02691332.
Healthy systems in physiology and medicine are remarkable for their structural variability and dynamical complexity. The concept of fractal growth and form offers novel approaches to understanding morphogenesis and function from the level of the gene to the organism. For example, scale-invariance and long-range power-law correlations are features of non-coding DNA sequences as well as of healthy heartbeat dynamics. For cardiac regulation, perturbation of the control mechanisms by disease or aging may lead to a breakdown of these long-range correlations that normally extend over thousands of heartbeats. Quantification of such long-range scaling alterations are providing new approaches to problems ranging from molecular evolution to monitoring patients at high risk of sudden death. We briefly review recent work from our laboratory concerning the application of fractals to two apparently unrelated problems: DNA organization and beat-to-beat heart rate variability. We show how the measurement of long-range power-law correlations may provide new understanding of nucleotide organization as well as of the complex fluctuations of the heartbeat under normal and pathologic conditions.
生理学和医学中的健康系统以其结构变异性和动态复杂性而著称。分形生长和形态的概念为理解从基因水平到生物体水平的形态发生和功能提供了新方法。例如，尺度不变性和长程幂律相关性是非编码DNA序列以及健康心跳动态的特征。对于心脏调节而言，疾病或衰老对控制机制的干扰可能导致这些通常延伸数千次心跳的长程相关性的破坏。对这种长程标度改变的量化为从分子进化到监测猝死高危患者等一系列问题提供了新方法。我们简要回顾了我们实验室最近关于分形在两个明显不相关问题上的应用的工作：DNA组织和逐搏心率变异性。我们展示了长程幂律相关性的测量如何能为正常和病理条件下的核苷酸组织以及心跳的复杂波动提供新的理解。
