68,575 research outputs found
Potential ring of Dirac nodes in a new polymorph of CaP
We report the crystal structure of a new polymorph of CaP, and an
analysis of its electronic structure. The crystal structure was determined
through Rietveld refinements of powder synchrotron x-ray diffraction data.
CaP is found to be a variant of the MnSi structure type, with a
Ca ion deficiency compared to the ideal 5:3 stoichiometry to yield a
charge-balanced compound. We also report the observation of a secondary phase,
CaPH, in which the Ca and P sites are fully occupied and the presence
of interstitial hydride ions creates a closed-shell electron-precise compound.
We show via electronic structure calculations of CaP that the compound
is stabilized by a gap in the density of states compared to the hypothetical
compound CaP. Moreover, the calculated band structure of CaP
indicates that it should be a three-dimensional Dirac semimetal with a highly
unusual ring of Dirac nodes at the Fermi level. The Dirac states are protected
against gap opening by a mirror plane in a manner analogous to graphene. The
results suggest that further study of the electronic properties of CaP
will be of interest
Recent Trends in Hospitalization for Acute Myocardial Infarction in Beijing: Increasing Overall Burden and a Transition From ST-Segment Elevation to Non-ST-Segment Elevation Myocardial Infarction in a Population-Based Study
Comparable data on trends of hospitalization rates for ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) and non-STEMI (NSTEMI) remain unavailable in representative Asian populations.To examine the temporal trends of hospitalization for acute myocardial infarction (AMI) and its subtypes in Beijing.Patients hospitalized for AMI in Beijing from January 1, 2007 to December 31, 2012 were identified from the validated Hospital Discharge Information System. Trends in hospitalization rates, in-hospital mortality, length of stay (LOS), and hospitalization costs were analyzed by regression models for total AMI and for STEMI and NSTEMI separately. In total, 77,943 patients were admitted for AMI in Beijing during the 6 years, among whom 67.5% were males and 62.4% had STEMI. During the period, the rate of AMI hospitalization per 100,000 population increased by 31.2% (from 55.8 to 73.3 per 100,000 population) after age standardization, with a slight decrease in STEMI but a 3-fold increase in NSTEMI. The ratio of STEMI to NSTEMI decreased dramatically from 6.5:1.0 to 1.3:1.0. The age-standardized in-hospital mortality decreased from 11.2% to 8.6%, with a significant decreasing trend evident for STEMI in males and females (P < 0.001) and for NSTEMI in males (P = 0.02). The rate of percutaneous coronary intervention increased from 28.7% to 55.6% among STEMI patients. The total cost for AMI hospitalization increased by 56.8% after adjusting for inflation, although the LOS decreased by 1 day.The hospitalization burden for AMI has been increasing in Beijing with a transition from STEMI to NSTEMI. Diverse temporal trends in AMI subtypes from the unselected "real-world" data in Beijing may help to guide the management of AMI in China and other developing countries
Feature Tracking Cardiac Magnetic Resonance via Deep Learning and Spline Optimization
Feature tracking Cardiac Magnetic Resonance (CMR) has recently emerged as an
area of interest for quantification of regional cardiac function from balanced,
steady state free precession (SSFP) cine sequences. However, currently
available techniques lack full automation, limiting reproducibility. We propose
a fully automated technique whereby a CMR image sequence is first segmented
with a deep, fully convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture, and
quadratic basis splines are fitted simultaneously across all cardiac frames
using least squares optimization. Experiments are performed using data from 42
patients with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) and 21 healthy control
subjects. In terms of segmentation, we compared state-of-the-art CNN
frameworks, U-Net and dilated convolution architectures, with and without
temporal context, using cross validation with three folds. Performance relative
to expert manual segmentation was similar across all networks: pixel accuracy
was ~97%, intersection-over-union (IoU) across all classes was ~87%, and IoU
across foreground classes only was ~85%. Endocardial left ventricular
circumferential strain calculated from the proposed pipeline was significantly
different in control and disease subjects (-25.3% vs -29.1%, p = 0.006), in
agreement with the current clinical literature.Comment: Accepted to Functional Imaging and Modeling of the Heart (FIMH) 201
Surface-wave interferometry on single subwavelength slit-groove structures fabricated on gold films
We apply the technique of far-field interferometry to measure the properties
of surface waves generated by two-dimensional (2D) single subwavelength
slit-groove structures on gold films. The effective surface index of refraction
measured for the surface wave propagating over a distance of more than 12
microns is determined to be 1.016 with a measurement uncertainty of 0.004, to
within experimental uncertainty of the expected bound surface plasmon-polariton
(SPP) value for a Au/Air interface of 1.018. We compare these measurements to
finite-difference-time-domain (FDTD) numerical simulations of the optical field
transmission through these devices. We find excellent agreement between the
measurements and the simulations for the surface index of refraction. The
measurements also show that the surface wave propagation parameter exhibits
transient behavior close to the slit, evolving smoothly from greater values
asymptotically toward the value expected for the SPP over the first 2-3 microns
of slit-groove distance. This behavior is confirmed by the FDTD simulations
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