2014/02/09 by Gabriel Seiden, Sofia Curland
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Medicine · Neuroscience · Physics and Astronomy · #Cellular automaton #Comparative Animal Anatomy Studies #Dynamics (music) #Excitable medium #Olfactory and Sensory Function Studies #Tongue #Voice and Speech Disorders #physics.bio-ph #physics.med-ph #q-bio.TO
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/1367-2630/17/3/033049
published as New J. Phys. 17 (3) 033049 (2015)
arxiv created 2014/02/09 · openalex publication_date 2015/03/31 · arxiv updated 2015/04/17 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Geographic tongue (GT) is a medical condition affecting approximately 2% of the population, whereby the papillae covering the upper part of the tongue are lost due to a slowly expanding inflammation. The resultant dynamical appearance of the tongue has striking similarities with well known out-of-equilibrium phenomena observed in excitable media, such as forest fires, cardiac dynamics, chemically driven reaction-diffusion systems and morphogenesis in multicellular organisms. Here we identify GT as a novel example of excitable media dynamics and explore the evolution of the condition from a dynamical systems perspective. We focus on two characteristic aspects of GT in particular: anisotropic expansion of lesions and re-entry of the inflammation into recovering regions. Our investigation sheds light on the evolution of the inflammation and suggests a practical way to classify the severity of the condition, based on the characteristic patterns observed in GT patients.