Scaling, growth and cyclicity in biology: a new computational approach

BACKGROUND: The Phenomenological Universalities approach has been developed by P.P. Delsanto and collaborators during the past 2–3 years. It represents a new tool for the analysis of experimental datasets and cross-fertilization among different fields, from physics/engineering to medicine and social sciences. In fact, it allows similarities to be detected among datasets in totally different fields and acts upon them as a magnifying glass, enabling all the available information to be extracted in a simple way. In nonlinear problems it allows the nonscaling invariance to be retrieved by means of suitable redefined fractal-dimensioned variables. RESULTS: The main goal of the present contribution is to extend the applicability of the new approach to the study of problems of growth with cyclicity, which are of particular relevance in the fields of biology and medicine. CONCLUSION: As an example of its implementation, the method is applied to the analysis of human growth curves. The excellent quality of the results (R(2 )= 0.988) demonstrates the usefulness and reliability of the approach.