Sunlight supply and gas exchange systems in microalgal bioreactor

The bioreactor with sunlight supply system and gas exchange systems presented has proved feasible in ground tests and shows much promise for space use as a closed ecological life support system device. The chief conclusions concerning the specification of total system needed for a life support system for a man in a space station are the following: (1) Sunlight supply system - compactness and low electrical consumption; (2) Bioreactor system - high density and growth rate of chlorella; and (3) Gas exchange system - enough for O2 production and CO2 assimilation

DRINet for medical image segmentation

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have revolutionized medical image analysis over the past few years. The UNet architecture is one of the most well-known CNN architectures for semantic segmentation and has achieved remarkable successes in many different medical image segmentation applications. The U-Net architecture consists of standard convolution layers, pooling layers, and upsampling layers. These convolution layers learn representative features of input images and construct segmentations based on the features. However, the features learned by standard convolution layers are not distinctive when the differences among different categories are subtle in terms of intensity, location, shape, and size. In this paper, we propose a novel CNN architecture, called Dense-Res-Inception Net (DRINet), which addresses this challenging problem. The proposed DRINet consists of three blocks, namely a convolutional block with dense connections, a deconvolutional block with residual Inception modules, and an unpooling block. Our proposed architecture outperforms the U-Net in three different challenging applications, namely multi-class segmentation of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) on brain CT images, multi-organ segmentation on abdominal CT images, multi-class brain tumour segmentation on MR images

Frustrated Spin System in theta-(BEDT-TTF)_2RbZn(SCN)_4

The origin of the spin gap behavior in the low-temperature dimerized phase of theta-(BEDT-TTF)_2RbZn(SCN)_4 has been theoretically studied based on the Hartree-Fock approximation for the on-site Coulomb interaction at absolute zero. Calculations show that, in the parameter region considered to be relevant to this compound, antiferromagnetic ordering is stabilized between dimers consisting of pairs of molecules coupled with the largest transfer integral. Based on this result an effective localized spin 1/2 model is constructed which indicates the existence of the frustration among spins. This frustration may result in the formation of spin gap.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures, to be published in J. Phys. Soc. Jpn. 67 (1998) no.

Multi-Orbital Molecular Compound (TTM-TTP)I_3: Effective Model and Fragment Decomposition

The electronic structure of the molecular compound (TTM-TTP)I_3, which exhibits a peculiar intra-molecular charge ordering, has been studied using multi-configuration ab initio calculations. First we derive an effective Hubbard-type model based on the molecular orbitals (MOs) of TTM-TTP; we set up a two-orbital Hamiltonian for the two MOs near the Fermi energy and determine its full parameters: the transfer integrals, the Coulomb and exchange interactions. The tight-binding band structure obtained from these transfer integrals is consistent with the result of the direct band calculation based on density functional theory. Then, by decomposing the frontier MOs into two parts, i.e., fragments, we find that the stacked TTM-TTP molecules can be described by a two-leg ladder model, while the inter-fragment Coulomb energies are scaled to the inverse of their distances. This result indicates that the fragment picture that we proposed earlier [M.-L. Bonnet et al.: J. Chem. Phys. 132 (2010) 214705] successfully describes the low-energy properties of this compound.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, published versio