Fractal analysis of hemodynamic changes in rat brains

Traditional autoradiographic image analysis has been restricted to the assessment of local cerebral blood flow (CBF) or glucose utilization in individual brains, with repeated measurements from the same animal. It is advantageous, however, to generate a "mean" image representing the group trend of multiple replicate studies, and to a dynamic function for tracking CBF changes. We used an affine transformation to map corresponding sections into a template to produce an averaged brain. CBF values were recorded as a profile while scanning a line on an averaged section. We used an affine transformation to perform fractal interpolation for each of the CBF profiles. These interpolation functions can serve as modeling of CBF variations. The fractal dimension for each of the interpolation functions was also calculated.