Identifying Suspicious Regions of Covid-19 by Abnormality-Sensitive Activation Mapping

This paper presents a fully-automated method for the identification of suspicious regions of a coronavirus disease (COVID-19) on chest CT volumes. One major role of chest CT scanning in COVID-19 diagnoses is identification of an inflammation particular to the disease. This task is generally performed by radiologists through an interpretation of the CT volumes, however, because of the heavy workload, an automatic analysis method using a computer is desired. Most computer-aided diagnosis studies have addressed only a portion of the elements necessary for the identification. In this work, we realize the identification method through a classification task by using a 2.5-dimensional CNN with three-dimensional attention mechanisms. We visualize the suspicious regions by applying a backpropagation based on positive gradients to attention-weighted features. We perform experiments on an in-house dataset and two public datasets to reveal the generalization ability of the proposed method. The proposed architecture achieved AUCs of over 0.900 for all the datasets, and mean sensitivity $0.853 \pm 0.036$ and specificity $0.870 \pm 0.040$. The method can also identify notable lesions pointed out in the radiology report as suspicious regions.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figure

Effect of Annealing Temperature of Ni-P/Si on its Lithiation and Delithiation Properties

Annealed Ni–P–coated Si (Ni–P/Si) anodes for lithium-ion batteries have shown a superior cycle life with discharge capacity of 1000 mA h g−1 over 1100 cycles in some ionic-liquid electrolytes. However, the annealing temperature has yet to be optimized for Ni–P/Si electrodes. We investigated the electrochemical performance of Ni–P/Si electrode annealed at various temperatures in this study. The Ni–P/Si electrodes annealed at 800 ± 20 °C exhibited a superior cycle life with a reversible capacity of 1000 mA h g−1 over 1000 cycles, whereas the capacity of the electrodes annealed at temperatures of 750 °C and 850 °C faded at approximately 500 cycles. At 800 °C, a newly formed NiSi2 phase was theorized to significantly contribute to improving adhesion between the Ni–P coating layer and the Si particles. The Ni–P coating particles tended to aggregate at 850 °C, leading to a reduction in the coating effect, that is, a decline in their reactivity with Li+, acceleration of electrode disintegration, and a reduction in electrical conductivity. On the other hand, Ni–P/Si electrodes annealed at 850 °C exhibited a superior rate performance. The amount of available NiSi2 which ultimately contributed to higher reactivity with Li should increase

Effects of Splenectomy on Spontaneously Chronic Pancreatitis in aly/aly Mice

Background and Aim. Mice with alymphoplasia (aly/aly) mutation characterized by a lack of lymph nodes, Peyer's patches, and well-defined lymphoid follicles in the spleen were found. In this study, we used splenectomized aly/aly mice to elucidate the effects of secondary lymphoid organs in the development of aly/aly autoimmune pancreatitis. Methods. Forty-eight 10-week-old aly/aly mice were divided into two groups for splenectomy and sham operation. Histological and immunohistochemical analyses of the pancreas were performed at the ages of 20, 30, and 40 weeks old after operation, respectively. Results. Our results showed that mononuclear cell infiltration was restricted to the interlobular connective tissues at the age of 20 weeks, and not increase obviously at the age of 30 and 40 weeks in splenectomized aly/aly mice. Furthermore, an apparent decrease in the expressions of CD4+ T, CD8+ T, and B cells was detected in the pancreatic tissues compared with sham aly/aly mice, however, no significant difference in macrophage expression between mice with and without a splenectomy. Conclusions. Inflammation infiltration and development of the pancreatitis in aly/aly mice were suppressed effectively after splenectomy, which was, at least partly, correlated to inhibition of the infiltration of T and B cells in pancreatic tissues but not to macrophages

Observation of distorted Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution of epithermal ions in LHD

A distorted Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution of epithermal ions is observed associated with the collapse of energetic ions triggered by the tongue shaped deformation. The tongue shaped deformation is characterized by the plasma displacement localized in the toroidal, poloidal, and radial directions at the non-rational magnetic flux surface in toroidal plasma. Moment analysis of the ion velocity distribution measured with charge exchange spectroscopy is studied in order to investigate the impact of tongue event on ion distribution. A clear non-zero skewness (3rd moment) and kurtosis (4th moment –3) of ion velocity distribution in the epithermal region (within three times of thermal velocity) is observed after the tongue event. This observation indicates the clear evidence of the distortion of ion velocity distribution from Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution. This distortion from Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution is observed in one-third of plasma minor radius region near the plasma edge and disappears in the ion-ion collision time scale

Isotope effect in transient electron thermal transport property and its impact on the electron internal transport barrier formation in LHD

In this study, we perform a comprehensive comparison of the transport hysteresis width in deuterium (D) plasmas, hydrogen (H) plasmas, and D-H mixed plasmas. The core focused modulation electron cyclotron resonance heating (MECH) is applied as the heat source perturbation, and the heat flux is evaluated using the energy conservation equation with the measured electron temperature response and the ECH deposition profile calculated by the ray-tracing scheme. Systematic density scan in plasmas with different ion mass reveals that there is no significant isotope effect in their hysteresis width. It is found that plasmas with heavier isotope mass can easily form the electron internal transport barrier. As the hysteresis width is insensitive to the isotope mass, the classical part of the diffusivity is considered to be responsible for the isotope effect in the transport barrier formation