6,789 research outputs found
Polarimetric Thermal to Visible Face Verification via Self-Attention Guided Synthesis
Polarimetric thermal to visible face verification entails matching two images
that contain significant domain differences. Several recent approaches have
attempted to synthesize visible faces from thermal images for cross-modal
matching. In this paper, we take a different approach in which rather than
focusing only on synthesizing visible faces from thermal faces, we also propose
to synthesize thermal faces from visible faces. Our intuition is based on the
fact that thermal images also contain some discriminative information about the
person for verification. Deep features from a pre-trained Convolutional Neural
Network (CNN) are extracted from the original as well as the synthesized
images. These features are then fused to generate a template which is then used
for verification. The proposed synthesis network is based on the self-attention
generative adversarial network (SAGAN) which essentially allows efficient
attention-guided image synthesis. Extensive experiments on the ARL polarimetric
thermal face dataset demonstrate that the proposed method achieves
state-of-the-art performance.Comment: This work is accepted at the 12th IAPR International Conference On
Biometrics (ICB 2019
CO J = 2 - 1 Emission from Evolved Stars in the Galactic Bulge
We observe a sample of 8 evolved stars in the Galactic Bulge in the CO J = 2
- 1 line using the Submillimeter Array (SMA) with angular resolution of 1 - 4
arcseconds. These stars have been detected previously at infrared wavelengths,
and several of them have OH maser emission. We detect CO J = 2 - 1 emission
from three of the sources in the sample: OH 359.943 +0.260, [SLO2003] A12, and
[SLO2003] A51. We do not detect the remaining 5 stars in the sample because of
heavy contamination from the galactic foreground CO emission. Combining CO data
with observations at infrared wavelengths constraining dust mass loss from
these stars, we determine the gas-to-dust ratios of the Galactic Bulge stars
for which CO emission is detected. For OH 359.943 +0.260, we determine a gas
mass-loss rate of 7.9 (+/- 2.2) x 10^-5 M_Sun/year and a gas-to-dust ratio of
310 (+/- 89). For [SLO2003] A12, we find a gas mass-loss rate of 5.4 (+/- 2.8)
x 10^-5 M_Sun/year and a gas-to-dust ratio of 220 (+/- 110). For [SLO2003] A51,
we find a gas mass-loss rate of 3.4 (+/- 3.0) x 10^-5 M_Sun/year and a
gas-to-dust ratio of 160 (+/- 140), reflecting the low quality of our tentative
detection of the CO J = 2 - 1 emission from A51. We find the CO J = 2 - 1
detections of OH/IR stars in the Galactic Bulge require lower average CO J = 2
- 1 backgrounds.Comment: 40 pages, 16 figures, appeared in the 1 March 2013 issue of the
Astrophysical Journa
A brief review of low-dose rate (LDR) and high-dose rate (HDR) brachytherapy boost for high-risk prostate
For patients with unfavorable or high-risk prostate cancer, dose escalated radiation therapy leads to improved progression free survival but attempts to deliver increased dose by external beam radiation therapy (EBRT) alone can be limited by late toxicities to nearby genitourinary and gastrointestinal organs at risk. Brachytherapy is a method to deliver dose escalation in conjunction with EBRT with a potentially improved late toxicity profile and improved prostate cancer related outcomes. At least three randomized controlled trials have demonstrated improved biochemical control with the addition of either low-dose rate (LDR) or high-dose rate (HDR) brachytherapy to EBRT, although only ASCENDE-RT compared brachytherapy to dose-escalated EBRT but did report an over 50% improvement in biochemical failure with a LDR boost. Multiple single institution and comparative research series also support the use of a brachytherapy boost in the DE-EBRT era and demonstrate excellent prostate cancer specific outcomes. Despite improved oncologic outcomes with a brachytherapy boost in the high-risk setting, the utilization of both LDR, and HDR brachytherapy use is declining. The acute genitourinary toxicities when brachytherapy boost is combined with EBRT, particularly a LDR boost, are of concern in comparison to EBRT alone. HDR brachytherapy boost has many physical properties inherent to its rapid delivery of a large dose which may reduce acute toxicities and also appeal to the radiobiology of prostate cancer. We herein review the evidence for use of either LDR or HDR brachytherapy boost for high-risk prostate cancer and summarize comparisons between the two treatment modalities
Angiotensin II blockade and aortic-root dilation in Marfan's syndrome
Background: Progressive enlargement of the aortic root, leading to dissection, is the main cause of premature death in patients with Marfan's syndrome. Recent data from mouse models of Marfan's syndrome suggest that aortic-root enlargement is caused by excessive signaling by transforming growth factor (beta) (TGF-(beta)) that can be mitigated by treatment with TGF-(beta) antagonists, including angiotensin II-receptor blockers (ARBs). We evaluated the clinical response to ARBs in pediatric patients with Marfan's syndrome who had severe aortic-root enlargement.
Methods: We identified 18 pediatric patients with Marfan's syndrome who had been followed during 12 to 47 months of therapy with ARBs after other medical therapy had failed to prevent progressive aortic-root enlargement. The ARB was losartan in 17 patients and irbesartan in 1 patient. We evaluated the efficacy of ARB therapy by comparing the rates of change in aortic-root diameter before and after the initiation of treatment with ARBs.
Results: The mean (+/-SD) rate of change in aortic-root diameter decreased significantly from 3.54+/-2.87 mm per year during previous medical therapy to 0.46+/-0.62 mm per year during ARB therapy (P<0.001). The deviation of aortic-root enlargement from normal, as expressed by the rate of change in z scores, was reduced by a mean difference of 1.47 z scores per year (95% confidence interval, 0.70 to 2.24; P<0.001) after the initiation of ARB therapy. The sinotubular junction, which is prone to dilation in Marfan's syndrome as well, also showed a reduced rate of change in diameter during ARB therapy (P<0.05), whereas the distal ascending aorta, which does not normally become dilated in Marfan's syndrome, was not affected by ARB therapy.
Conclusions: In a small cohort study, the use of ARB therapy in patients with Marfan's syndrome significantly slowed the rate of progressive aortic-root dilation. These findings require confirmation in a randomized trial
On the motion of hairy black holes in Einstein-Maxwell-dilaton theories
Starting from the static, spherically symmetric black hole solutions in
massless Einstein-Maxwell-dilaton (EMD) theories, we build a "skeleton" action,
that is, we phenomenologically replace black holes by an appropriate effective
point particle action, which is well suited to the formal treatment of the
many-body problem in EMD theories. We find that, depending crucially on the
value of their scalar cosmological environment, black holes can undergo steep
"scalarization" transitions, inducing large deviations to the general
relativistic two-body dynamics, as shown, for example, when computing the first
post-Keplerian Lagrangian of EMD theories
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