Finger-like lysing patterns of blood clots.

One-dimensional modeling of fibrinolysis (Senf, 1979; Zidansek and Blinc, 1991; Diamond and Anand, 1993) has accounted for the dissolution velocity, but the shape of the lysing patterns can be explained only by two- or three- drug-induced blood clot dissolution patterns obtained by proton nuclear magnetic resonance imaging, which can be described by the enzyme transport-limited system of fibrinolytic chemical equations with diffusion and perfusion terms (Zidansek and Blinc, 1991) in the reaction time approximation if the random character of gel porosity is taken into account. A two-dimensional calculation based on the Hele-Shaw random walk models (Kadanoff, 1985; Liang, 1986) leads to fractal lysing patterns as, indeed, is observed. The fractal dimension of the experimental lysing patterns changes from 1.2 at the beginning of the experiments to a maximum of approximately 1.3 in the middle and then decreases toward one when the clot is recanalized.