SERIES IN MATHEMATICAL BIOLOGY AND MEDICINE – serie

Over the past few decades numerous scientists have called for a unification of the fields of embryo development, genetics, and evolution. Each field has glaring holes in its ability to explain the fundamental phenomena of life. In this book, the author shows how the phenomenon of cell differentiation, considered in its temporal and spatial aspects during embryogenesis, provides a starting point for a unified theory of multicellular organisms (plants, fungi and animals), including their evolution and genetics. This unification is based on the recent discovery of differentiation waves by the author and his colleagues, described in the appendices, and illustrated by a flip movie prepared by a medical artist. To help the reader through the many fields covered, a glossary is included.This book will be of great value to the researcher and practicing doctors/scientists alike. The research students will receive an in-depth tutorial on the topics covered. The seasoned researcher will appreciate the applications and the gold mine of other possibilities for novel research topics.

This unique book presents a broad range of data on geometry and topology of long-distance liquid transport networks in nature including circulatory and respiratory systems of mammals, trophic fluid transport systems of animals, and conducting systems of higher plants. It is the very first book where evidence of the common design principles and optimal properties of the transportation networks of vascular plants and animals is provided.The book also provides a comprehensive comparative study of the recent measurement results and data analysis, including unique data obtained by the author to conduct systems of plant leaves of different shapes, sizes, venation types and evolutionary ages. It was shown that the mathematical solutions of the optimization problem for the animal and plant conducting systems lead to the same design principles, despite different physical conditions of the fluid transport.

This monograph has the ambitious aim of developing a mathematical theory of complex biological systems with special attention to the phenomena of ageing, degeneration and repair of biological tissues under individual self-repair actions that may have good potential in medical therapy.The approach to mathematically modeling biological systems needs to tackle the additional difficulties generated by the peculiarities of living matter. These include the lack of invariance principles, abilities to express strategies for individual fitness, heterogeneous behaviors, competition up to proliferative and/or destructive actions, mutations, learning ability, evolution and many others.Applied mathematicians in the field of living systems, especially biological systems, will appreciate the special class of integro-differential equations offered here for modeling at the molecular, cellular and tissue scales. A unique perspective is also presented with a number of case studies in biological modeling.

This research monograph discusses newly developed mathematical models and methods that provide biologically meaningful inferences from data on cancer latency produced by follow-up and discrete surveillance studies. Methods for designing optimal strategies of cancer surveillance are systematically presented for the first time in this book. It offers new approaches to the stochastic description of tumor latency, employs biologically-based models for making statistical inference from data on tumor recurrence and also discusses methods of statistical analysis of data resulting from discrete surveillance strategies. It also offers insight into the role of prognostic factors based on the interpretation of their effects in terms of parameters endowed with biological meaning, as well as methods for designing optimal schedules of cancer screening and surveillance. Last but not least, it discusses survival models allowing for cure rates and the choice of optimal treatment based on covariate information, and presents numerous examples of real data analysis.

This book begins with the modeling of evolutionary constraints on morphological diversity in ecology and then extends to development and evolution. The authors have used tractable, traditional models and mathematics, and carefully linked traditional ecological equations with production and consumption. This book contains new, more powerful models and has applied them, for example, in chemical ecology of coral reef. The production space serves as an appropriate background space from which the environmentally induced curvature in the allometric relations of superorganisms such as siphonophores, polymorphic bryozoans and ants can be measured. Projective differential geometry is used to formula dynamical models of evolution by heterochrony and by symbiosis and a theory of stable and weakly chaotic production, important in ecology and in modeling the evolution of individuality is developed.

This three volume series represents a selected and refereed collection of papers contributed by the participants of the First World Congress on Computational Medicine, Public Health, and Biotechnology, held in 1994 at Austin, Texas. Over 500 individuals, from 30 countries attended this meeting. In addition, this collection contains a number of papers from the Australian CSIRO High Performance Computing Meeting held that same year.

The book deals with biological, mathematical, descriptive, causal and systemic phyllotaxis. It aims at reflecting the widest possible range of ideas and research closely related to phyllotaxis and contains 30 well illustrated chapters.The book has three parts of equal importance. The first two parts concern data collecting, pattern recognition and pattern generation to which students of phyllotaxis are well accustomed. The third part is devoted to the problem of origins of phyllotactic patterns, giving the field of phyllotaxis the universality it requires to be fully understood.Phyllotaxis-like patterns are found in places where genes are not necessarily present. Part III concerns general comparative morphology, homologies with phyllotactic patterns, and recent trends on evolution that can help to understand phyllotaxis.The distinguished researchers who accepted to participate in the production of this book, strongly contributed to the field of phyllotaxis in the past and have devoted a lot of their time to the fascinating subject coming up with most valuable findings, or are newcomers with original ideas that may be very relevant for the future of the field. The book summarizes and updates their contributions, and promotes new avenues in the treatment of phyllotaxis.This book on mathematical and biological phyllotaxis is the first collective book ever. A landmark in the history of phyllotaxis.

This is a collection of refereed papers presented at the 4th International Conference on Mathematical Population Dynamics. The selection of papers and their organization were made by the following persons: O Arino, D Axelrod, V Capasso, W Fitzgibbon, P Jagers, M Kimmel, D Kirschner, C Mode, B Novak, R Sachs, W Stephan, A Swierniak and H Thieme.It features some of the new trends in cell and human population dynamics. The main link between the two traits is that human populations of concern here are essentially those subject to cell diseases, either the processes of anarchic proliferation or those by which some cell lines are killed by an infectious agent.The volume is divided into 3 main parts. Each part is subdivided into chapters, each chapter concentrating on a specific aspect. Each aspect is illustrated by one or several examples, developed in sections contributed by several authors. A detailed introduction for each part will enable the reader to refer to chapters of interest. An index and a bibliography for each part is also included for easy reference.This book will be useful for those interested in the subject matter.

Recent developments in the neurosciences have considerably modified our knowledge of both the operating modes of neurons and information processing in the cortex. Multi-unit recordings have enabled temporal correlations to be detected, within temporal windows of the order of 1ms. Oscillations corresponding to a quasi-periodic spike-giving, synchronized over several visual cortical areas, have been observed in anaesthesized cats and monkeys. Recent studies have also focused on the role played by the dendritic arborization.These developments have led to considerable interest in a coding scheme which relies on precise spatio-temporal patterns from both the theoretical and experimental points of view. This prompts us to look into new models for information processing which will proceed, for example, from a synchronous detection of correlated spike giving, and is particularly robust against noise. Such models could bring about original technical applications for information processing and control.Further developments in this field may be of major importance for our understanding of the basic mechanisms of perception and cognition. They could also lead to new concepts in applications directed towards artificial perception and pattern recognition. Up to now, artificial systems for pattern recognition are far from reaching the standards of human vision. Systems based on a temporal coding by spikes may now be expected to bring about major improvements in this field.This book covers the lectures delivered at a summer school on neuronal information processing. It includes information on all the above-mentioned developments, and also provides the reader with the state-of-the-art in every relevant field, including the neurosciences, physics, mathematics, and information and control theory.

This unique volume presents major developments and trends in bioinformatics and its applications. Comprising high-quality scientific research papers and state-of-the-art survey articles, the book has been divided into five main sections: Microarray Analysis and Regulatory Networks; Machine Learning and Statistical Analysis; Biomolecular Sequence and Structure Analysis; Symmetry in Sequences; and Signal Processing, Image Processing and Visualization. The results of these investigations help the practicing biologist in many ways: in identifying unknown connections, in narrowing down possibilities for a search, in suggesting new hypotheses, designing new experiments, validating existing models or proposing new ones. It is an essential source of reference for researchers and graduate students in bioinformatics, computer science, mathematics, statistics, and biological sciences based on select papers from the “The International Conference on Bioinformatics and Its Application” (ICBA), held December 16–19, 2004 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, USA.