Lung tissue rheology and 1/f noise

The mechanical properties of lung tissue are important contributors to both the elastic and dissipative properties of the entire organ at normal breathing frequencies. A number of detailed studies have shown that the stress adaptation in the tissue of the lung following a step change in volume is very accurately described by the function t^-k for some small positive constant k. We applied step increases in length to lung parenchymal strips and found the ensuing stress recovery to be extremely accurately described by t^-k over almost 3 decades of time, despite the quasi-static stress-length characteristics of the strips being highly nonlinear. The corresponding complex impedance of lung tissue was found to have a magnitude that varied inversely with frequency. We note that this is highly reminiscent of a phenomenon known as 1/f noise, which has been shown to occur ubiquitously throughout the natural world. 1/f noise has been postulated to be a reflection of the complexity of the system that produces it, something like a central limit theorem for dynamic systems. We have therefore developed the hypothesis that the t^-k nature of lung tissue stress adaptation follows from the fact that lung tissue itself is composed of innumerable components that interact in an extremely rich and varied manner. Thus, although the constant k is no doubt determined by the particular constituents of the tissue, we postulate that the actual functional form of the stress adaptation is not.