Fractional Calculus in Bioengineering, Part 1

TL;DRAbstract

Fractional calculus (integral and differential operations of noninteger order) is not often used to model biological systems. Although the basic mathematical ideas were developed long ago by the mathematicians Leibniz (1695), Liouville (1834), Riemann (1892), and others and brought to the attention of the engineering world by Oliver Heaviside in the 1890s, it was not until 1974 that the first book on the topic was published by Oldham and Spanier. Recent monographs and symposia proceedings have highlighted the application of fractional calculus in physics, continuum mechanics, signal processing, and electromagnetics, but with few examples of applications in bioengineering. This is surprising because the methods of fractional calculus, when defined as a Laplace or Fourier convolution product, are suitable for solving many problems in biomedical research. For example, early studies by Cole (1933) and Hodgkin (1946) of the electrical properties of nerve cell membranes and the propagation o

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