Copyright © 1999 Hindawi Publishing Corporation. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

The fractal tree-like structures can be divided into three classes, according to the value of the similarity dimension D s : D s < D , D s = D and D s > D , where D is the topological dimension of the embedding space. It is argued that most of the physiological tree-like structures have D s ≥ D . The notion of the self-overlapping exponent is introduced to characterise the trees with D s > D . A model of the human blood-vessel system is proposed. The model is consistent with the processes governing the growth of the blood-vessels and yields D s = 3.4 . The model is used to analyse the transport of passive component by blood.