This book primarily focuses on the study of various neurological disorders, including Parkinson’s (PD), Huntington (HD), Epilepsy, Alzheimer’s and Motor Neuron Diseases (MND) from a new perspective by analyzing the physiological signals associated with them using non-linear dynamics. The development of nonlinear methods has significantly helped to study complex nonlinear systems in detail by providing accurate and reliable information. The book provides a brief introduction to the central nervous system and its various disorders, their effects on health and quality of life, and their respective courses of treatment, followed by different bioelectrical signals like those detected by Electroencephalography (EEG), Electrocardiography (ECG), and Electromyography (EMG). In turn, the book discusses a range of nonlinear techniques, fractals, multifractals, and Higuchi’s Fractal Dimension (HFD), with mathematical examples and procedures. A review of studies conducted to date on neurological disorders like epilepsy, dementia, Parkinson’s, Huntington, Alzheimer’s, and Motor Neuron Diseases, which incorporate linear and nonlinear techniques, is also provided. The book subsequently presents new findings on neurological disorders of the central nervous system, namely Parkinson’s disease and Huntington’s disease, by analyzing their gait characteristics using a nonlinear fractal based technique: Multifractal Detrended Fluctuation Analysis (MFDFA). In closing, the book elaborates on several parameters that can be obtained from cross-correlation studies of ECG and blood pressure, and can be used as markers for neurological disorders.
This book primarily focuses on the study of various neurological disorders, including Parkinson's (PD), Huntington (HD), Epilepsy, Alzheimer's and Motor Neuron Diseases (MND) from a new perspective by analyzing the physiological signals associated with them using non-linear dynamics. The development of nonlinear methods has significantly helped to study complex nonlinear systems in detail by providing accurate and reliable information. The book provides a brief introduction to the central nervous system and its various disorders, their effects on health and quality of life, and their respective courses of treatment, followed by different bioelectrical signals like those detected by Electroencephalography (EEG), Electrocardiography (ECG), and Electromyography (EMG). In turn, the book discusses a range of nonlinear techniques, fractals, multifractals, and Higuchi's Fractal Dimension (HFD), with mathematical examples and procedures. A review of studies conducted to date on neurological disorders like epilepsy, dementia, Parkinson's, Huntington, Alzheimer's, and Motor Neuron Diseases, which incorporate linear and nonlinear techniques, is also provided. The book subsequently presents new findings on neurological disorders of the central nervous system, namely Parkinson's disease and Huntington's disease, by analyzing their gait characteristics using a nonlinear fractal based technique: Multifractal Detrended Fluctuation Analysis (MFDFA). In closing, the book elaborates on several parameters that can be obtained from cross-correlation studies of ECG and blood pressure, and can be used as markers for neurological disorders.
The history of describing natural objects using geometry is as old as the advent of science itself, in which traditional shapes are the basis of our intuitive understanding of geometry. However, nature is not restricted to such Euclidean objects which are only characterized typically by integer dimensions. Hence, the conventional geometric approach cannot meet the requirements of solving or analysing nonlinear problems which are related with natural phenomena, therefore, the fractal theory has been born, which aims to understand complexity and provide an innovative way to recognize irregularity and complex systems. Although the concepts of fractal geometry have found wide applications in many forefront areas of science, engineering and societal issues, they also have interesting implications of a more practical nature for the older classical areas of science. Since its discovery, there has been a surge of research activities in using this powerful concept in almost every branch of scientific disciplines to gain deep insights into many unresolved problems. This book includes eight chapters which focus on gathering cutting-edge research and proposing application of fractals features in both traditional scientific disciplines and in applied fields.
Widespread chronic diseases (e.g., heart diseases, diabetes and its complications, stroke, cancer, brain diseases) constitute a significant cause of rising healthcare costs and pose a significant burden on quality-of-life for many individuals. Despite the increased need for smart healthcare sensing systems that monitor / measure patients’ body balance, there is no coherent theory that facilitates the modeling of human physiological processes and the design and optimization of future healthcare cyber-physical systems (HCPS). The HCPS are expected to mine the patient’s physiological state based on available continuous sensing, quantify risk indices corresponding to the onset of abnormality, signal the need for critical medical intervention in real-time by communicating patient’s medical information via a network from individual to hospital, and most importantly control (actuate) vital health signals (e.g., cardiac pacing, insulin level, blood pressure) within personalized homeostasis. To prevent health complications, maintain good health and/or avoid fatal conditions calls for a cross-disciplinary approach to HCPS design where recent statistical-physics inspired discoveries done by collaborations between physicists and physicians are shared and enriched by applied mathematicians, control theorists and bioengineers. This critical and urgent multi-disciplinary approach has to unify the current state of knowledge and address the following fundamental challenges: One fundamental challenge is represented by the need to mine and understand the complexity of the structure and dynamics of the physiological systems in healthy homeostasis and associated with a disease (such as diabetes). Along the same lines, we need rigorous mathematical techniques for identifying the interactions between integrated physiologic systems and understanding their role within the overall networking architecture of healthy dynamics. Another fundamental challenge calls for a deeper understanding of stochastic feedback and variability in biological systems and physiological processes, in particular, and for deciphering their implications not only on how to mathematically characterize homeostasis, but also on defining new control strategies that are accounting for intra- and inter-patient specificity – a truly mathematical approach to personalized medicine. Numerous recent studies have demonstrated that heart rate variability, blood glucose, neural signals and other interdependent physiological processes demonstrate fractal and non-stationary characteristics. Exploiting statistical physics concepts, numerous recent research studies demonstrated that healthy human physiological processes exhibit complex critical phenomena with deep implications for how homeostasis should be defined and how control strategies should be developed when prolonged abnormal deviations are observed. In addition, several efforts have tried to connect these fractal characteristics with new optimal control strategies that implemented in medical devices such as pacemakers and artificial pancreas could improve the efficiency of medical therapies and the quality-of-life of patients but neglecting the overall networking architecture of human physiology. Consequently, rigorously analyzing the complexity and dynamics of physiological processes (e.g., blood glucose and its associated implications and interdependencies with other physiological processes) represents a fundamental step towards providing a quantifiable (mathematical) definition of homeostasis in the context of critical phenomena, understanding the onset of chronic diseases, predicting deviations from healthy homeostasis and developing new more efficient medical therapies that carefully account for the physiological complexity, intra- and inter-patient variability, rather than ignoring it. This Research Topic aims to open a synergetic and timely effort between physicians, physicists, applied mathematicians, signal processing, bioengineering and biomedical experts to organize the state of knowledge in mining the complexity of physiological systems and their implications for constructing more accurate mathematical models and designing QoL-aware control strategies implemented in the new generation of HCPS devices. By bringing together multi-disciplinary researchers seeking to understand the many aspects of human physiology and its complexity, we aim at enabling a paradigm shift in designing future medical devices that translates mathematical characteristics in predictable mathematical models quantifying not only the degree of homeostasis, but also providing fundamentally new control strategies within the personalized medicine era.
Managing Complexity in Healthcare introduces the ComEntEth (Complex Entropic Ethical) model as an integrated bio-medical and philosophical approach to understanding how people get things done in healthcare. Drawing on the complexity sciences, studies of entropy in living organisms and the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas, healthcare is theorised as energetic relational exchanges between people as entropic and ethical entities that unfold around a central attractor: Reduction in elevated entropy or suffering in patients. Living entities are engaged in a continuous struggle against the tendency to produce entropy. From the cellular to the collective of human endeavours, the tendency of complex systems is to disorder and decay. Yet in the micro-activity of healthcare enterprise, people resist this tendency by expending energy to create order and sustain life. Making sense of how this miraculous work is made possible is the foundation of this book. Through practical examples – from analysis of practitioner burnout, rural and remote healthcare, the functioning of emergency departments, to government, social and institutional responses to the COVID-19 pandemic – this new integral philosophy provides practitioners, managers, policy designers, and scholars an effective way to understand the dynamics of daily processes and practices that link the micro of everyday interactions with the macro-trends of healthcare.
From reviews of Deer, eds., Comprehensive Treatment of Chronic Pain by Medical, Interventional, and Integrative Approaches: "Comprehensive Treatment of Chronic Pain by Medical, Interventional, and Integrative Approaches is a major textbook... [I]t should be a part of all departmental libraries and in the reference collection of pain fellows and pain practitioners. In fact, this text could be to pain as Miller is to general anesthesia." Journal of Neurosurgical Anesthesiology Edited by master clinician-experts appointed by the American Academy of Pain Medicine, this is a soft cover version of the Integrative section of the acclaimed Deer, eds., Comprehensive Treatment of Chronic Pain by Medical, Interventional, and Integrative Approaches. It is intended as a primary reference for busy clinicians who seek up-to-date and authoritative information about integrative approaches to treating chronic pain. Behavioral dimensions of the experience and management of pain Integrative approaches for treating the "whole person" Legal issues, such as failure to treat pain First-hand patient accounts "Key Points" preview contents of each chapter
Microglia are largely known as the major orchestrators of the brain inflammatory response. As such, they have been traditionally studied in various contexts of disease, where their activation has been assumed to induce a wide range of detrimental effects. In the last few years, a series of discoveries have challenged the current view of microglia, showing their active and positive contribution to normal brain function. This Research Topic reviewed the novel physiological roles of microglia in the developing, mature and aging brain, under non-pathological conditions. In particular, this Research Topic discussed the cellular and molecular mechanisms by which microglia contribute to the formation, pruning and plasticity of synapses; the regulation of adult neurogenesis as well as hippocampal learning and memory; among other important roles. Because these novel findings defy our understanding of microglial function in health as much as in disease, this Research Topic also summarized the current view of microglial nomenclature, phenotypes, origin and differentiation, and contribution to various brain pathologies. Additionally, novel imaging approaches and molecular tools to study microglia in their non-activated state have been discussed. In conclusion, this Research Topic seeked to emphasize how the current research in neuroscience is challenged by never-resting microglia.
I know that most men, including those at ease with the problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives. Joseph Ford quoting Tolstoy (Gleick, 1987) We are used to thinking that natural objects have a certain form and that this form is determined by a characteristic scale. If we magnify the object beyond this scale, no new features are revealed. To correctly measure the properties of the object, such as length, area, or volume, we measure it at a resolution finer than the characteristic scale of the object. We expect that the value we measure has a unique value for the object. This simple idea is the basis of the calculus, Euclidean geometry, and the theory of measurement. However, Mandelbrot (1977, 1983) brought to the world's attention that many natural objects simply do not have this preconceived form. Many of the structures in space and processes in time of living things have a very different form. Living things have structures in space and fluctuations in time that cannot be characterized by one spatial or temporal scale. They extend over many spatial or temporal scales.
This book is an attempt to indicate to researchers and clinicians a simple way to approach the complexity of cardiovascular neural regulation. A conceptual pillar like homeostasis is contrasted with instability and a continuous interaction of opposing mechanisms that have negative and positive feedback characteristics, and is considered to subserve the multitude of patterns pertaining to physiology. However, in pathophysiological conditions the final design is most often replaced by largely purposeless neural mechanisms. The complexity of cardiovascular neural regulation, reflected by the state of sympathovagal balance, is also assessed in the frequency domain. Power spectrum analysis of heart rate and arterial pressure variability, a sophisticated but simply explained approach, provides an unprecedented tool to evaluate this interaction in both physiological and pathophysiological conditions. The elementary characteristics of nonlinear dynamics are also outlined. Finally, the need for an ethical structure for science and medicine is analyzed.
