Fractal Geometry of Airway Remodeling in Human Asthma
Bibliographic record
Abstract
RATIONALE: Airway wall remodeling is an important aspect of asthma. It has proven difficult to assess quantitatively as it involves changes in several components of the airway wall. OBJECTIVE: To develop a simple method for quantifying the overall severity of airway wall remodeling in asthmatic airways using fractal geometry. METHODS: Negative-pressure silicone rubber casts of lungs were made using autopsy material from three groups: fatal asthma, nonfatal asthma, and nonasthma control. All subjects were lifelong nonsmokers. A fractal dimension was calculated on two-dimensional digital images of each cast. RESULTS: Nonasthma control casts had smooth walls and dichotomous branching patterns with nontapering segments. Asthmatic casts showed many abnormalities, including airway truncation from mucous plugs, longitudinal ridges, and horizontal corrugations corresponding to elastic bundles and smooth muscle hypertrophy, respectively, and surface projections associated with ectatic mucous gland ducts. Fractal dimensions were calculated from digitized images using an information method. The average fractal dimensions of the airways of both the fatal asthma (1.72) and nonfatal asthma (1.76) groups were significantly (p<0.01 and p=0.032, respectively) lower than that of the nonasthma control group (1.83). The lower fractal dimension of asthmatic airways correlated with a decreased overall structural complexity and pathologic severity of disease. CONCLUSION: Fractal analysis is a simple and useful technique for quantifying the chronic structural changes of airway remodeling in asthma.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".