Scaling behavior in crackle sound during lung inflation
Adriano Mesquita Alencar, Zoltán Hantos, Ferenc Peták, József Tolnai, Tibor Asztalos, Stefano Zapperi, José S. Andrade, Sergey V. Buldyrev, Harry Eugene Stanley, Bélâ Suki · Physical review. E, Statistical physics, plasmas, fluids, and related interdisciplinary topics · 1999
During slow inflation of lung lobes, we measure a sequence of short explosive transient sound waves called "crackles," each consisting of an initial spike followed by ringing. The crackle time series is irregular and intermittent, with the number of spikes of size s following a power law, n(s) proportional, variants(-alpha), with alpha=2.77+/-0.05. We develop a model of crackle wave generation and propagation in a tree structure that combines the avalanchelike opening of airway segments with the wave propagation of crackles in a tree structure. The agreement between experiments and simulations suggests that (i) the irregularities are a consequence of structural heterogeneity in the lung, (ii) the intermittent behavior is due to the avalanchelike opening, and (iii) the scaling is a result of successive attenuations acting on the sound spikes as they propagate through a cascade of bifurcations along the airway tree.