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Fractal Analysis of Human Retinal Blood Vessel Patterns: Developmental and Diagnostic Aspects

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Book cover Noninvasive Diagnostic Techniques in Ophthalmology

Abstract

The underlying unity of patterns in nature can be mathematically analyzed in terms of their scaling relations. This methodology is a sequel to the work of D’Arcy Thompson during the early 1900s.1 There are two terms, similar and self-similar, that are important to distinguish. A photograph of a face and its enlargement have the same shape and are called similar. However, a small portion of the photograph, e.g., the mouth, when magnified does not look like the original face in the photograph. The idea of similarity also exists in geometry. Two polygons are similar if there are areas of correspondence between their vertices such that the corresponding sides of the polygons are proportional and the corresponding angles are equal.

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Authors
  1. Barry R. Masters
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, 30332-0250, USA

    Barry R. Masters Ph.D.

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© 1990 Springer-Verlag New York Inc.

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Masters, B.R. (1990). Fractal Analysis of Human Retinal Blood Vessel Patterns: Developmental and Diagnostic Aspects. In: Masters, B.R. (eds) Noninvasive Diagnostic Techniques in Ophthalmology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-8896-8_27

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-8896-8_27

  • Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4613-8898-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4613-8896-8

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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