BACKGROUND The field of medical geology addresses the relationships between exposure to specific geological characteristics and the development of a range of health problems: for example, long-term exposure to arsenic in drinking water can result in the development of skin conditions and cancers. While these relationships are well characterised for some examples, in others there is a lack of un...

Medical geology is defined as the study of the relationship between the geosphere and human health. Two recent books in this rapidly expanding field (1, 2) focus on current issues that generally involve exposure to toxic elements or compounds of direct geogenic origin, such as arsenic, mercury, and asbestos. A detailed understanding of these issues ultimately leads to scientifically based recom...

In this review, atmospheric particulates as composite airborne earth materials often containing both natural and anthropogenic components were examined in the context of medical geology. Despite a vast number of both experimental and epidemiological studies confirming the direct and indirect links between atmospheric particulates and human health, the exact nature of mechanisms affecting the pa...

Background Balkan endemic nephropathy (BEN) is an irreversible, chronic, tubulo-interstitial nephropathy of unknown origin, geographically confined to several rural regions of the Balkan Peninsula. The first "official" observation of a disease resembling BEN was made almost six decades ago in regions comprising the former Yugoslavia (Danilovic et al., 1957). Shortly thereafter, similar descript...

Motivation Today, “Big Data” is a new information overloading problem in many different areas. Such areas include health cares (e.g., medical records, bioinformatics), e-sciences (e.g., physics, chemistry, and geology), and social sciences (e.g., politics). Thus, as we have various types of feasible data from a number of available sources, it is becoming increasingly more difficult to efficient...

Random fields are a useful tool for modelling spatial phenomenon like environmental fields, including for example, hydrology, geology, oceanography and medical images. Many times the chosen model has to include some statistical dependence structure that might be present across the scales. Thus, an usual assumption is self-similarity (see [Lamp62]), defined for a random field {X(x)}x∈Rd on R by