The tongue as an excitable medium
Geographic tongue (GT) is a medical condition affecting approximately 2% of the population, whereby the papillae covering the upper part of the tongue are lost due to a slowly expanding inflammation. The resultant dynamical appearance of the tongue has striking similarities with well known out-of-equilibrium phenomena observed in excitable media, such as forest fires, cardiac dynamics, chemically driven reaction-diffusion systems and morphogenesis in multicellular organisms. Here we identify GT as a novel example of excitable media dynamics and explore the evolution of the condition from a dynamical systems perspective. We focus on two characteristic aspects of GT in particular: anisotropic expansion of lesions and re-entry of the inflammation into recovering regions. Our investigation sheds light on the evolution of the inflammation and suggests a practical way to classify the severity of the condition, based on the characteristic patterns observed in GT patients.