- Here it was shown that the surface of human cervical epithelial cells demonstrates substantially different fractal behavior when the cell becomes cancerous. Fractals are "self-similar" irregular shapes that repeat their pattern when zoomed in or out. These complex disorderly patterns are typically formed under far-from-equilibrium conditions, or emerge from chaos. Examples of fractal shape range from the large-scale structure of the Universe to the shape of trees and snowflakes. This paper demonstrated that the surface of human cancer cells could be treated as fractal. Analyzing the adhesion images of individual cells obtained with atomic force microscopy, it was found that cancer cells demonstrate a simple fractal behavior, whereas normal cells could only be approximated at best as multifractal. This leads to an unusually high accuracy in identification of cancer at the single cell level. Although some difference in the surface of cancer cell was expected, the observed unambiguous divergence of the fractal behavior was a surprise. This may shed light on the nature of cancer from a new physics prospective. Furthermore, it can be used for early detection of cervical cancer with accuracy surpassing the existing methods.
