Fractal Analysis on Human Colonic Pressure Activities based on the Box-counting Method

The colonic tissue is a complicated dynamic system and the colonic activities it generates are composed of irregular segmental waves, which are referred to as erratic fluctuations or spikes. They are also highly irregular with subunit fractal structure. The traditional time-frequency domain statistics like the averaged amplitude, the motility index and the power spectrum, etc. are insufficient to describe such fluctuations. Thus the fractal box-counting dimension is proposed and the fractal scaling behaviors of the human colonic pressure activities under the physiological conditions are studied. It is shown that the dimension of the resting activity is smaller than that of the normal one, whereas the clipped version, which corresponds to the activity of the constipation patient, shows with higher fractal dimension. It may indicate a practical application to assess the colonic motility, which is often indicated by the colonic pressure activity.

Authors:

• Rongguo Yan
• Guozheng Yan
• Banghua Yang

Keywords:

• Colonic pressure activity
• erratic fluctuations
• fractal dimension and spikes.

References:

[1] W.X Wang, G.Z. Yan, et al., "A non-invasive method for gastrointestinal
parameter monitoring," World Journal of Gastroenterology, vol.11, no.4,
pp.521-524, 2005.
[2] P.P. Jiang, G.Z Yang, et al., "Researches on a telemetry system for
gastrointestinal motility monitoring," in The International Symposium on
Micromechatronics and Human Science, 2003.
[3] R.G Yan, G.Z Yan, W.Q Zhang, L. Wang, "Long-range correlations in
human colonic pressure activity," in The 5th International Workshop on
Biosignal Interpretation, Tokyo, Japan, 2005.
[4] R.G. Yan, G.Z. Yan, L. Wang, "Nonlinear Chaotic Behaviours of Human
Colonic Pressure Activity Based on Chaotic Theory," WSEAS
Transactions on biology and biomedicine, vol.2, no.4, pp.343-350, 2005.
[5] R.G. Yan, G.Z. Yan, L. Wang, "Nonlinear chaotic analysis of human
colonic pressure activity," in The 2005 WSEAS international conference
on biophysics and bioengineering, Athens, Greece, 2005.
[6] A.L. Goldberger, L.A.N. Amaral, J.M. Hausdorff, P.C. Ivanov, C.K. Peng
and H.E. Stanley, "Fractal dynamics in physiology: alterations with
disease and aging," in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
of the United States of America, vol.99, suppl.1, pp.2466-2472, 2002.
[7] http://www.dchaos.com/portfolio/dchaos1/new_nonlinear_man_article.h
tml.
[8] http://www.ortho.lsuhsc.edu/Faculty/Marino/Temple/Temple.html.
[9] http://www.math.sunysb.edu/~scott/Book331/Fractal_Dimension.html
[10] Rasband, S. N. "Fractal Dimension." Ch. 4 in Chaotic Dynamics of
Nonlinear Systems. New York: Wiley, pp. 71-83, 1990.
[11] B.B. Mandelbrot, The Fractal Geometry of Nature, San Francisco:
Freeman, 1982.
[12] A. Bunde, S. Havlin, Fractals and Disordered Systems, Springer Verlag,
Berlin, Heidelberg, 1991.
[13] http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/~pbourke/fractals/fracdim/
[14] C. Liu, L.D. Blumhardt, "Disability outcome measures in therapeutic
trials of relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis: effects of heterogeneity of
disease course in placebo cohorts," J Neurol Neurosurg Psychiatry,
vol.68, no.4, pp.450-457, 2000.