552 research outputs found
Unified description of floppy and rigid rotating Wigner molecules formed in quantum dots
Restoration of broken circular symmetry is used to explore the
characteristics of the ground states and the excitation spectra of rotating
Wigner molecules (RWM's) formed in two-dimensional parabolic N-electron quantum
dots. In high magnetic fields, the RWM's are floppy rotors with the energies of
the magic angular momentum (L) states obeying aL + b/L^{1/2}. Under such fields
the ground-state energies (referenced to the kinetic energy in the lowest
Landau level) approach the electrostatic energy of N point charges in the
classical equilibrium molecular configuration. At zero field and strong
interelectron repulsion, the RWM's behave like quasiclassical rigid rotors
whose energies vary as L^2. The particular L-dependence in high B is inherent
and natural to a floppy rotating WM, and it can be used as a crucial diagnostic
tool for resolving the recently posed question whether the composite-fermion or
the RWM picture is appropriate for QD's.Comment: 5 pages. Revtex4 with 3 EPS figures and 2 tables . For related
papers, see http://www.prism.gatech.edu/~ph274c
DeepCut: Object Segmentation from Bounding Box Annotations using Convolutional Neural Networks
In this paper, we propose DeepCut, a method to obtain pixelwise object
segmentations given an image dataset labelled with bounding box annotations. It
extends the approach of the well-known GrabCut method to include machine
learning by training a neural network classifier from bounding box annotations.
We formulate the problem as an energy minimisation problem over a
densely-connected conditional random field and iteratively update the training
targets to obtain pixelwise object segmentations. Additionally, we propose
variants of the DeepCut method and compare those to a naive approach to CNN
training under weak supervision. We test its applicability to solve brain and
lung segmentation problems on a challenging fetal magnetic resonance dataset
and obtain encouraging results in terms of accuracy
Asymmetric copper-catalyzed C-N cross-couplings induced by visible light
Despite a well-developed and growing body of work in copper catalysis, the potential of copper to serve as a photocatalyst remains underexplored. Here we describe a photoinduced copper-catalyzed method for coupling readily available racemic tertiary alkyl chloride electrophiles with amines to generate fully substituted stereocenters with high enantioselectivity. The reaction proceeds at –40°C under excitation by a blue light-emitting diode and benefits from the use of a single, Earth-abundant transition metal acting as both the photocatalyst and the source of asymmetric induction. An enantioconvergent mechanism transforms the racemic starting material into a single product enantiomer
Concentration of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) in the serum of patients with suspected ovarian cancer.
As a promoter of angiogenesis, vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) is believed to play a pivotal role in tumour growth and metastasis. The aim of this study was to determine the value of preoperative serum VEGF levels in the early diagnosis of ovarian cancer and in the differential diagnosis of adnexal masses. We examined preoperative serum VEGF levels in healthy women (n = 131), patients with benign ovarian cysts (n = 81) and in ovarian cancer patients (n = 44) by using an ELISA (R&D Systems, Minneapolis, MN, USA). A logistic regression model was carried out to determine the influence of VEGF and CA 125 on the probability of malignancy. VEGF revealed a significant influence on the odds of presenting with malignancy vs healthy women (P = 0.001). At 363.7 pg ml(-1), VEGF achieved a sensitivity of 54% and a specificity of 77%. With respect to the differentiation between benign cysts and ovarian cancer, CA 125 (P < 0.0001) but not VEGF (P = 0.229) predicts the presence of malignancy in a multivariate model. In conclusion, VEGF does not appear to be a useful tool in the early diagnosis of ovarian cancer or for indicating the absence or presence of malignancy in patients with an adnexal mass
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