Patient-Specific Prosthetic Fingers by Remote Collaboration - A Case Study

The concealment of amputation through prosthesis usage can shield an amputee from social stigma and help improve the emotional healing process especially at the early stages of hand or finger loss. However, the traditional techniques in prosthesis fabrication defy this as the patients need numerous visits to the clinics for measurements, fitting and follow-ups. This paper presents a method for constructing a prosthetic finger through online collaboration with the designer. The main input from the amputee comes from the Computer Tomography (CT) data in the region of the affected and the non-affected fingers. These data are sent over the internet and the prosthesis is constructed using visualization, computer-aided design and manufacturing tools. The finished product is then shipped to the patient. A case study with a single patient having an amputated ring finger at the proximal interphalangeal joint shows that the proposed method has a potential to address the patient's psychosocial concerns and minimize the exposure of the finger loss to the public.Comment: Open Access articl

Irradiation of Materials with Short, Intense Ion pulses at NDCX-II

We present an overview of the performance of the Neutralized Drift Compression Experiment-II (NDCX-II) accelerator at Berkeley Lab, and report on recent target experiments on beam driven melting and transmission ion energy loss measurements with nanosecond and millimeter-scale ion beam pulses and thin tin foils. Bunches with around 10^11 ions, 1-mm radius, and 2-30 ns FWHM duration have been created with corresponding fluences in the range of 0.1 to 0.7 J/cm^2. To achieve these short pulse durations and mm-scale focal spot radii, the 1.1 MeV He+ ion beam is neutralized in a drift compression section, which removes the space charge defocusing effect during final compression and focusing. The beam space charge and drift compression techniques resemble necessary beam conditions and manipulations in heavy ion inertial fusion accelerators. Quantitative comparison of detailed particle-in-cell simulations with the experiment play an important role in optimizing accelerator performance.Comment: 15 pages, 7 figures. revised manuscript submitted to Laser and Particle Beam

On Global Flipped SU(5) GUTs in F-theory

We construct an SU(4) spectral divisor and its factorization of types (3,1) and (2,2) based on the construction proposed in [1]. We calculate the chiral spectra of flipped SU(5) GUTs by using the spectral divisor construction. The results agree with those from the analysis of semi-local spectral covers. Our computations provide an example for the validity of the spectral divisor construction and suggest that the standard heterotic formulae are applicable to the case of F-theory on an elliptically fibered Calabi-Yau fourfold with no heterotic dual.Comment: 45 pages, 12 tables, 1 figure; typos corrected, footnotes added, and a reference adde

Why the Realist-Instrumentalist Debate about Rational Choice Rests on a Mistake

Within the social sciences, much controversy exists about which status should be ascribed to the rationality assumption that forms the core of rational choice theories. Whilst realists argue that the rationality assumption is an empirical claim which describes real processes that cause individual action, instrumentalists maintain that it amounts to nothing more than an analytically set axiom or ‘as if’ hypothesis which helps in the generation of accurate predictions. In this paper, I argue that this realist-instrumentalist debate about rational choice theory can be overcome once it is realised that the rationality assumption is neither an empirical description nor an ‘as if’ hypothesis, but a normative claim

Representing complex data using localized principal components with application to astronomical data

Often the relation between the variables constituting a multivariate data space might be characterized by one or more of the terms: ``nonlinear'', ``branched'', ``disconnected'', ``bended'', ``curved'', ``heterogeneous'', or, more general, ``complex''. In these cases, simple principal component analysis (PCA) as a tool for dimension reduction can fail badly. Of the many alternative approaches proposed so far, local approximations of PCA are among the most promising. This paper will give a short review of localized versions of PCA, focusing on local principal curves and local partitioning algorithms. Furthermore we discuss projections other than the local principal components. When performing local dimension reduction for regression or classification problems it is important to focus not only on the manifold structure of the covariates, but also on the response variable(s). Local principal components only achieve the former, whereas localized regression approaches concentrate on the latter. Local projection directions derived from the partial least squares (PLS) algorithm offer an interesting trade-off between these two objectives. We apply these methods to several real data sets. In particular, we consider simulated astrophysical data from the future Galactic survey mission Gaia.Comment: 25 pages. In "Principal Manifolds for Data Visualization and Dimension Reduction", A. Gorban, B. Kegl, D. Wunsch, and A. Zinovyev (eds), Lecture Notes in Computational Science and Engineering, Springer, 2007, pp. 180--204, http://www.springer.com/dal/home/generic/search/results?SGWID=1-40109-22-173750210-

Classification of time series by shapelet transformation

Time-series classification (TSC) problems present a specific challenge for classification algorithms: how to measure similarity between series. A \emph{shapelet} is a time-series subsequence that allows for TSC based on local, phase-independent similarity in shape. Shapelet-based classification uses the similarity between a shapelet and a series as a discriminatory feature. One benefit of the shapelet approach is that shapelets are comprehensible, and can offer insight into the problem domain. The original shapelet-based classifier embeds the shapelet-discovery algorithm in a decision tree, and uses information gain to assess the quality of candidates, finding a new shapelet at each node of the tree through an enumerative search. Subsequent research has focused mainly on techniques to speed up the search. We examine how best to use the shapelet primitive to construct classifiers. We propose a single-scan shapelet algorithm that finds the best $k$ shapelets, which are used to produce a transformed dataset, where each of the $k$ features represent the distance between a time series and a shapelet. The primary advantages over the embedded approach are that the transformed data can be used in conjunction with any classifier, and that there is no recursive search for shapelets. We demonstrate that the transformed data, in conjunction with more complex classifiers, gives greater accuracy than the embedded shapelet tree. We also evaluate three similarity measures that produce equivalent results to information gain in less time. Finally, we show that by conducting post-transform clustering of shapelets, we can enhance the interpretability of the transformed data. We conduct our experiments on 29 datasets: 17 from the UCR repository, and 12 we provide ourselve

U(n) Spectral Covers from Decomposition

We construct decomposed spectral covers for bundles on elliptically fibered Calabi-Yau threefolds whose structure groups are S(U(1) x U(4)), S(U(2) x U(3)) and S(U(1) x U(1) x U(3)) in heterotic string compactifications. The decomposition requires not only the tuning of the SU(5) spectral covers but also the tuning of the complex structure moduli of the Calabi-Yau threefolds. This configuration is translated to geometric data on F-theory side. We find that the monodromy locus for two-cycles in K3 fibered Calabi-Yau fourfolds in a stable degeneration limit is globally factorized with squared factors under the decomposition conditions. This signals that the monodromy group is reduced and there is a U(1) symmetry in a low energy effective field theory. To support that, we explicitly check the reduction of a monodromy group in an appreciable region of the moduli space for an $E_6$ gauge theory with (1+2) decomposition. This may provide a systematic way for constructing F-theory models with U(1) symmetries.Comment: 41 pages, 14 figures; v2: minor improvements and a reference adde

High serum alkaline phosphatase levels, a study in 181 Thai adult hospitalized patients

BACKGROUND: Alkaline phosphatase (ALP) is an important enzyme mainly derived from the liver, bones and in lesser amounts from intestines, placenta, kidneys and leukocytes. An increase in ALP levels in the serum is frequently associated with a variety of diseases. This study was done in order to determine the diseases associated with a high ALP level among Thai adult hospitalized patients. METHOD: A review was made of medical records of inpatients with high ALP level above 1000 IU/L in King Chulalongkorn Memorial Hospital, Thailand from January 1999 to December 1999. Excluded were cases of (a) patients who have bone involvements with malignancies, (b) pediatric patients younger than 15 years old and c) HIV-seropositive patients. RESULTS: A total of 181 hospitalized patients with eligible medical records were identified (96 males and 85 females, mean age 49.4 ± 16.1 years). Their ALP levels ranging from 1,001 to 3,067 IU/L, these patients were divided into four groups. CONCLUSION: High serum ALP levels in hospitalized patients were commonly found in three major groups having obstructive biliary diseases, infiltrative liver disease and sepsis. The study results were in accordance with previous reports in developed countries. Nonetheless, cholangiocarcionoma and some tropical diseases unique to our setting were also detected in these cases. where there was a marked elevation of serum ALP