High correlation of fractals for regional blood flows among resting and exercising skeletal muscles

The regional blood flow distributions within single skeletal muscles are markedly uneven both at rest and during exercise hyperemia. Fractals adequately describe this perfusion heterogeneity in the resting lateral head of the gastrocnemius muscle as well as in the myocardium. Recently, we provided evidence that the fractal dimension for the blood flow distributions in this resting muscle was strongly correlated with that of the myocardium in the same rabbit. Prompted by this hitherto unknown observation, we have now examined 1) whether fractals also describe perfusion distributions within muscles with a varying metabolic activity, and 2) whether the fractal dimensions for blood flow distributions to these muscles were correlated. We used pentobarbital-anesthetized rabbits and cats. The regional distributions of blood flow within various skeletal muscles were estimated by microsphere trapping. The data unequivocally showed that the perfusion distributions could be described with fractals both in resting and in exercising muscle in both species, the corresponding fractal dimensions ranging from 1.36 to 1.41. The fractal dimensions were markedly correlated (r2 ranged from 0.82 to 0.88) when both various resting and resting plus exercising muscles were compared in the same animal. This surprising finding of high correlations for the fractal dimensions among various muscles within one animal provides a novel characteristic of blood flow heterogeneity.