Phase transition of the microvascular network architecture in human pathologies.

We have investigated the microvascular pattern in acquired or genetic diseases in humans. The lower gingival and vestibular oral mucosa, as well as the optic nerve head, was chosen to characterize the vascular pattern complexity due to the simple accessibility and visibility Local fractal dimensions, fractal dimension of the minimum path and Lempel-Ziv complexity have been used as operational numerical tools to characterize the microvascular networks. In the normal healthy subjects microvascular networks show nonlinear values corresponding to the complexity of a diffusion limited aggregation (DLA) model, while in several acquired or genetic diseases they are approaching the ones of an invasion percolation model.