ReviewFrontiers in physiology2020
Fractal Analysis of Lung Structure in Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease.
Review in Frontiers in physiology, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed, 38 citations in OpenAlex.
- Integrated assessment of total airway count and pneumonia volume on chest computed tomography as a prognostic biomarker for coronavirus disease.European radiology · 2026Article
- Article
- Application of Fractal Radiomics and Machine Learning for Differentiation of Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer Subtypes on PET/MR Images.Journal of clinical medicine · 2025Article
- Plug-and-Play Self-Supervised Denoising for Pulmonary Perfusion MRI.Bioengineering (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Artificial intelligence-driven quantitative analysis of CT morphological differences between chronic thromboembolic pulmonary hypertension and chronic thromboembolic disease.Quantitative imaging in medicine and surgery · 2025Article
- Elevated Urotensin-II and TGF-β Levels in COPD: Biomarkers of Fibrosis and Airway Remodeling in Smokers.Medicina (Kaunas, Lithuania) · 2024Article
- Mesenchymal Vangl1 and Vangl2 facilitate airway elongation and widening independently of the planar cell polarity complex.Development (Cambridge, England) · 2024Article
- Orthotopic transplantation of the bioengineered lung using a mouse-scale perfusion-based bioreactor and human primary endothelial cells.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Expiratory Venous Volume and Arterial Tortuosity are Associated with Disease Severity and Mortality Risk in Patients with COPD: Results from COSYCONET.International journal of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease · 2024Observational
- Fractal complexity of daily physical activity and cognitive function in a midlife cohort.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- 3D imaging and morphometric descriptors of vascular networks on optically cleared organs.iScience · 2023Review
- A titratable murine model of progressive emphysema using tracheal porcine pancreatic elastase.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Quantifying the spatial clustering characteristics of radiographic emphysema explains variability in pulmonary function.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Fractal Characterization of the Mass Loss of Bronze by Erosion-Corrosion in Seawater.Materials (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Chest CT is often used for localizing and quantitating pathologies associated with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). While simple measurements of areas and volumes of emphysema and airway structure are common, these methods do not capture the structural complexity of the COPD lung. Since the concept of fractals has been successfully applied to evaluate complexity of the lung, this review is aimed at describing the fractal properties of airway disease, emphysema, and vascular abnormalities in COPD. An object forms a fractal if it exhibits the property of self-similarity at different length scales of evaluations. This fractal property is governed by power-law functions characterized by the fractal dimension (FD). Power-laws can also manifest in other statistical descriptors of structure such as the size distribution of emphysema clusters characterized by the power-law exponent D. Although D is not the same as FD of emphysematous clusters, it is a useful index to characterize the spatial pattern of disease progression and predict clinical outcomes in patients with COPD. The FD of the airway tree shape and the D of the size distribution of airway branches have been proposed indexes of structural assessment and clinical predictions. Simulations are also useful to understand the mechanism of disease progression. Therefore, the power-law and fractal analysis of the parenchyma and airways, especially when combined with computer simulations, could lead to a better understanding of the structural alterations during the progression of COPD and help identify subjects at a high risk of severe COPD.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.