Recent advancements in the EST project

The European Solar Telescope (EST) is a project of a new-generation solar telescope. It has a large aperture of 4~m, which is necessary for achieving high spatial and temporal resolution. The high polarimetric sensitivity of the EST will allow to measure the magnetic field in the solar atmosphere with unprecedented precision. Here, we summarise the recent advancements in the realisation of the EST project regarding the hardware development and the refinement of the science requirements.Comment: accepted to Advances in Space Researc

Recent advances in grain refinement of light metals and alloys

Grain refinement leads, in general, to a decreased tendency to hot tearing, a more dispersed and refined porosity distribution, and improved directional feeding characteristics during solidification. Reduced as-cast grain size can also lead to improved mechanical properties and wrought processing by reducing the recrystallized grain size and achieving a fully recrystallized microstructure. It is now well established that the two key factors controlling grain refinement are the nucleant particles including their potency, size distribution and particle number density, and the rate of development of growth restriction, Q, generated by the alloy chemistry which establishes the undercooling needed to trigger nucleation events and facilitates their survival. The theories underpinning our current understanding of nucleation and grain formation are presented. The application of the latest theories to the light alloys of Al, Mg and Ti is explored as well as their applicability to a range of casting and solidification environments. In addition, processing by the application of physical processes such as external fields and additive manufacturing is discussed. To conclude, the current challenges for the development of reliable grain refining technologies for difficult to refine alloy systems are presented

MedGAN: Medical Image Translation using GANs

Image-to-image translation is considered a new frontier in the field of medical image analysis, with numerous potential applications. However, a large portion of recent approaches offers individualized solutions based on specialized task-specific architectures or require refinement through non-end-to-end training. In this paper, we propose a new framework, named MedGAN, for medical image-to-image translation which operates on the image level in an end-to-end manner. MedGAN builds upon recent advances in the field of generative adversarial networks (GANs) by merging the adversarial framework with a new combination of non-adversarial losses. We utilize a discriminator network as a trainable feature extractor which penalizes the discrepancy between the translated medical images and the desired modalities. Moreover, style-transfer losses are utilized to match the textures and fine-structures of the desired target images to the translated images. Additionally, we present a new generator architecture, titled CasNet, which enhances the sharpness of the translated medical outputs through progressive refinement via encoder-decoder pairs. Without any application-specific modifications, we apply MedGAN on three different tasks: PET-CT translation, correction of MR motion artefacts and PET image denoising. Perceptual analysis by radiologists and quantitative evaluations illustrate that the MedGAN outperforms other existing translation approaches.Comment: 16 pages, 8 figure

Reconstruction of maxillofacial bone defects: Contemporary methods and future techniques

Reconstruction of maxillofacial continuity defects has always been a challenging tasks for the scientist and surgeons over the years. The main goal of the reconstruction of the maxillofacial region is to restore facial form, function, full rehabilitation of occlusion and articulation. A refinement in surgical technique and methods of reconstruction has improved patient’s quality of life. This manuscript reviewed exciting methods of bone reconstruction and confirms that the ideal system for reconstruction of critical size continuity defect of the jaw bones has yet to be found. Shortcoming and limitation of each method has been discussed. The author highlight recent advances on how tissue engineering which could offer biological substitute to restore, maintain, or improve oro-facial function

Deconstructing Simulated Annealing

Recent advances in mobile information and self-learning information offer a viable alternative to interrupts. Here, we disprove the refinement of the producer-consumer problem, demonstrates the practical importance of operating systems. We verify that the UNIVAC computer and simulated annealing [14] can collaborate to answer this quagmire

Time-domain formulation of cold plasma based on mass-lumped finite elements

Recent advances in FDTD simulations of simple dielectrics have opened the possibility of various forms of local refinement [1]. These possibilities are based on writing FDTD as a special case of a finite element technique. We have shown [3] that these techniques can be extended to Body-Of-Revolution (BOR) FDTD which is well-suited for modelling toroidal cavities. Further extending this technique to the time-domain modelling of plasmas presents difficulties: The classical "Whitney" basis-functions (and their analogues in toroidal geometries) are insufficiently smooth to be used as "testing" functions the time-domain constitutive equations of cold plasma [2]. In this paper, we present a set of basis-functions that can be used to write time-domain cold plasma as a mass lumped finite element scheme