6,304 research outputs found
Adiabatic Electroweak Baryogenesis Driven by an Axion-like Particle
An axion-like particle (ALP) offers a new direction in electroweak
baryogenesis because the periodic nature enables it to trigger a strong
first-order phase transition insensitively to the decay constant . For
much above TeV, the ALP-induced electroweak phase transition is approximately
described by adiabatic processes, distinguishing our scenario for electroweak
baryogenesis from the conventional ones. We show that, coupled to the
electroweak anomaly, the ALP can naturally realize spontaneous electroweak
baryogenesis to solve the matter-antimatter asymmetry problem for in the
range between about GeV and GeV. In such an ALP window, the
violation for baryogenesis is totally free from the experimental constraints,
especially from the recently improved limit on the electron electric dipole
moment. Future searches for ALPs could probe our scenario while revealing the
connection between electroweak symmetry breaking and baryogenesis.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures, appendices added, published versio
Pain Management of Herpes Zoster
Herpes zoster (HZ) is a disease triggered by the reactivation of latent varicella zoster virus (VZV) in spinal or cranial sensory ganglia, and is characterized by a painful vesicular eruption in the affected dermatome. Postherpetic neuralgia (PHN) is a chronic, neuropathic pain that can persist long beyond resolution of visible cutaneous manifestations which is often resistant to current analgesic treatments. The lifetime prevalence of herpes zoster is approximately 20–30% and about 9–34% of these patients develop PHN depending on its definition. Clinical experience has shown that PHN often develops in cases of inadequate initial pain management resulting in increased pain intensity. This review provides an overview of the treatment options for HZ and PHN, focusing on the therapeutic modalities of pain management. The primary objectives of management of HZ are to inhibit viral replication, relieve pain, and prevent associated complications, such as PHN. General treatments for acute HZ are combination of antiviral therapy with a short course of corticosteroids at the onset of the disease in conjunction with an effective control of acute pain, including nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, acetaminophen, opioids, and anticonvulsants such as gabapentin or pregabalin. Treatment of PHN is often resistant to the current pharmacologic methods. Therefore, a multimodal analgesic treatment regimen including topical lidocaine and capsaicin, systemic therapies, and the interventional treatments is necessary to alleviate pain and its effect on quality of life. As the incidence of HZ increases with age, the number of patients with HZ and PHN may increase in the future considering the gradual aging of the general population. Appropriate management of HZ can reduce the duration and intensity of pain from HZ, and prevent the development of PHN. In addition, prophylactic zoster vaccination can prevent or reduce the incidence of HZ and PHN. Further efforts are needed to minimize pain of the patients suffering from HZ and PHN as it affects the quality of life in the aspect of both physical and psychological impairments
Contextual Linear Bandits under Noisy Features: Towards Bayesian Oracles
We study contextual linear bandit problems under uncertainty on features;
they are noisy with missing entries. To address the challenges from the noise,
we analyze Bayesian oracles given observed noisy features. Our Bayesian
analysis finds that the optimal hypothesis can be far from the underlying
realizability function, depending on noise characteristics, which is highly
non-intuitive and does not occur for classical noiseless setups. This implies
that classical approaches cannot guarantee a non-trivial regret bound. We thus
propose an algorithm aiming at the Bayesian oracle from observed information
under this model, achieving regret bound with respect to
feature dimension and time horizon . We demonstrate the proposed
algorithm using synthetic and real-world datasets.Comment: 30 page
Effect of grain boundaries on ion migration in stabilized δ-Bi2O3 thin- film electrolyte
Solid electrolytes with high oxygen-ion conductivity are of significant interest for many applications. Over the past several decades, numerous studies have been conducted on the effect of grain boundaries on the process of increasing the ionic conductivity of solid electrolytes. Given that nanocrystalline thin- or thick-films have been investigated in relation to lowering the operating temperature of solid electrolytes to less than 650 °C, more rigorous and quantitative assessments are necessary to determine how the ion transport characteristics are affected by the numerous interfaces formed in nano-grains devices.
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Feature Re-calibration based Multiple Instance Learning for Whole Slide Image Classification
Whole slide image (WSI) classification is a fundamental task for the
diagnosis and treatment of diseases; but, curation of accurate labels is
time-consuming and limits the application of fully-supervised methods. To
address this, multiple instance learning (MIL) is a popular method that poses
classification as a weakly supervised learning task with slide-level labels
only. While current MIL methods apply variants of the attention mechanism to
re-weight instance features with stronger models, scant attention is paid to
the properties of the data distribution. In this work, we propose to
re-calibrate the distribution of a WSI bag (instances) by using the statistics
of the max-instance (critical) feature. We assume that in binary MIL, positive
bags have larger feature magnitudes than negatives, thus we can enforce the
model to maximize the discrepancy between bags with a metric feature loss that
models positive bags as out-of-distribution. To achieve this, unlike existing
MIL methods that use single-batch training modes, we propose balanced-batch
sampling to effectively use the feature loss i.e., (+/-) bags simultaneously.
Further, we employ a position encoding module (PEM) to model
spatial/morphological information, and perform pooling by multi-head
self-attention (PSMA) with a Transformer encoder. Experimental results on
existing benchmark datasets show our approach is effective and improves over
state-of-the-art MIL methods.Comment: MICCAI 202
Lifestyle Modification in Patients with Obstructive Sleep Apnea
Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is a disorder in which the upper respiratory tract is closed repeatedly during sleep. Treatment of OSA includes continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP), intraoral devices, and upper respiratory tract surgery, among which CPAP is known as the most effective treatment method. However, even in the case of CPAP, adherence rates during long-term follow-up are lowered considerably due to inconvenience of wearing, and low adherence rates limit its therapeutic effect. Therefore, studies have been carried out to confirm the effect of lifestyle modification which corrects modifiable risk factors of OSA, such as obesity. The aim of this study was to examine the effects of weight loss and aerobic exercise to improve the severity of OSA, and to examine the effect of drinking and smoking on OSA. In consideration of the difficulty of modifying one’s lifestyle through traditional individual counseling, we propose the use of smart devices in the management of patients’ lifestyles
Eosinophilic Otitis Media: CT and MRI Findings and Literature Review
Eosinophilic otitis media (EOM) is a relatively rare, intractable, middle ear disease with extremely viscous mucoid effusion containing eosinophils. EOM is associated with adult bronchial asthma and nasal allergies. Conventional treatments for otitis media with effusion (OME) or for chronic otitis media (COM), like tympanoplasty or mastoidectomy, when performed for the treatment of EOM, can induce severe complications such as deafness. Therefore, it should be differentiated from the usual type of OME or COM. To our knowledge, the clinical and imaging findings of EOM of temporal bone are not well-known to radiologists. We report here the CT and MRI findings of two EOM cases and review the clinical and histopathologic findings of this recently described disease entity
An Active and Soft Hydrogel Actuator to Stimulate Live Cell Clusters by Self-folding
The hydrogels are widely used in various applications, and their successful uses depend on controlling the mechanical properties. In this study, we present an advanced strategy to develop hydrogel actuator designed to stimulate live cell clusters by self-folding. The hydrogel actuator consisting of two layers with different expansion ratios were fabricated to have various curvatures in self-folding. The expansion ratio of the hydrogel tuned with the molecular weight and concentration of gel-forming polymers, and temperature-sensitive molecules in a controlled manner. As a result, the hydrogel actuator could stimulate live cell clusters by compression and tension repeatedly, in response to temperature. The cell clusters were compressed in the 0.7-fold decreases of the radius of curvature with 1.0 mm in room temperature, as compared to that of 1.4 mm in 37 degrees C. Interestingly, the vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) and insulin-like growth factor-binding protein-2 (IGFBP-2) in MCF-7 tumor cells exposed by mechanical stimulation was expressed more than in those without stimulation. Overall, this new strategy to prepare the active and soft hydrogel actuator would be actively used in tissue engineering, drug delivery, and micro-scale actuators
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