Interaction effect in two-dimensional Dirac fermions

Based on the Dirac equations in the two-dimensional $\pi-$ flux model, we study the interaction effects both in nontrivial gapped and gapless Dirac equations with numerical exact diagonalization method. In the presence of the nearest and next nearest neighbor interactions: for nontrivial gapped Dirac equation, the topological phase is robust and persists in a finite region of the phase diagram; while for gapless Dirac equation, charge-density-wave and stripe phases are identified and the phase diagram in $(V_1, V_2)$ plane is obtained. When the next-next-nearest neighbor interaction is further included to gapless Dirac equation, the topological phase expected in the mean-field theory is absent. Our results are related to the possibility of dynamically generating topological phase from the electronic correlations.Comment: 7 pages, 8 figures. More discussins are added; accepted for publication in Physical Review

The Impact of the Paycheck Protection Program on the liquidity and financial stability of U.S. Banks

Under the COVID-19 circumstances, the United States government established the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) which aimed at assisting small businesses to survive during the pandemic. Banks played a vital role in distributing the available PPP funding to small companies. The study examines the impact of the PPP on banks’ liquidity and financial stability. First, the paper investigates the difference in the financial performance between PPP-participating banks and banks who didn’t engage in the PPP by using the CAMEL rating system. Compared to non-PPP banks, PPP lenders exhibit superior capital adequacy, earning ability and liquidity but inferior asset quality and management efficiency. However, PPP lenders’ capitalization, asset quality, operating efficiency and liquidity became worse during the pandemic. Second, we explore the extent to which the banks used loan sales and securitization to issue PPP loans. According to the probit models, we find that PPP banks are more likely to sell and securitize loans, compared with non-PPP banks. Third, the research examines whether participating in the PPP increases bank lending. The result from the dynamic panel model shows real estate loans and consumer loans decrease, while the supply of commercial and industrial (C&I) loans significantly rises with the growth of PPP lending

Understanding Dynamic Collaboration in Teleconsultation

Information and communication technology (ICT) has been widely deployed in the provision of health care for decades. Teleconsultation, one of these new telemedicine solutions, has been prevalently implemented in numerous countries with its tremendous potential to improve healthcare. However, the clinical utility has remained at a disappointing level. Unlike prior research that focuses on the pre-adoption or implementation stages, our research explores not only the understanding the antecedences of actual usage in post-adoption of teleconsultation service, but also the reasons for low actual usage in clinical practice. We identify specific theoretical attributes that are relevant to our research question, and extend TOE into an integrative theoretical framework. Initial propositions are generated based on theoretical perspectives in each dimension of the framework. Finally, we design a comparative case study as our research methodology, and conduct deductive analysis to test our propositions using data from multiple sources. Theoretical and practical implications, as well as future research, are outlined

HIGT: Hierarchical Interaction Graph-Transformer for Whole Slide Image Analysis

In computation pathology, the pyramid structure of gigapixel Whole Slide Images (WSIs) has recently been studied for capturing various information from individual cell interactions to tissue microenvironments. This hierarchical structure is believed to be beneficial for cancer diagnosis and prognosis tasks. However, most previous hierarchical WSI analysis works (1) only characterize local or global correlations within the WSI pyramids and (2) use only unidirectional interaction between different resolutions, leading to an incomplete picture of WSI pyramids. To this end, this paper presents a novel Hierarchical Interaction Graph-Transformer (i.e., HIGT) for WSI analysis. With Graph Neural Network and Transformer as the building commons, HIGT can learn both short-range local information and long-range global representation of the WSI pyramids. Considering that the information from different resolutions is complementary and can benefit each other during the learning process, we further design a novel Bidirectional Interaction block to establish communication between different levels within the WSI pyramids. Finally, we aggregate both coarse-grained and fine-grained features learned from different levels together for slide-level prediction. We evaluate our methods on two public WSI datasets from TCGA projects, i.e., kidney carcinoma (KICA) and esophageal carcinoma (ESCA). Experimental results show that our HIGT outperforms both hierarchical and non-hierarchical state-of-the-art methods on both tumor subtyping and staging tasks.Comment: Accepted by MICCAI2023; Code is available in https://github.com/HKU-MedAI/HIG

Histopathological characteristics of adenomyosis: structure and microstructure

Adenomyosis is a benign uterine disease that pathologically shows endometrial glands and stroma in the myometrium. There are multiple lines of evidence that adenomyosis is associated with abnormal bleeding, painful menstruation, chronic pelvic pain, infertility, and spontaneous pregnancy loss. Pathologists have researched adenomyosis by studying tissue specimens from its first report more than 150 years ago, and differing viewpoints on its pathological alterations have been advanced. However, the gold standard histopathological definition of adenomyosis remains controversial to date. The diagnostic accuracy of adenomyosis has steadily increased due to the continual identification of unique molecular markers. This article provides a brief description of the pathological aspects of adenomyosis and discusses adenomyosis categorization based on histology. The clinical findings of uncommon adenomyosis are also presented to offer a thorough and detailed pathological profile. Furthermore, we describe the histolo