Asymmetric biasing for subgrid pattern adjustment

The location of a printed edge can be controlled to a fineness that is two orders of magnitude smaller than the design grid, if a slight displacement of the pattern can be tolerated. The essence of this asymmetric subgrid biasing technique is the crenelation of two edges of a pattern into different periods. Fractional arithmetic results in a bias increment that much smaller than that can be achieved with halftone biasing. For a design grid of 20 nm (1X) , and an exposure system with A = 248 nm, NA = 0.68, and a = 0.8, the bias increment can be as small as 0.22 nm.published_or_final_versio

Alternating phase-shifting mask with reduced aberration sensitivity: lithography considerations

Aberration sensitivity of alternating phase-shifting masks (PSMs) can be reduced by taking advantage of the trim exposure. Rather than a single phase region bordering each edge of a line, the enhanced alternating PSM technique uses multiple phase regions. The number of phase regions and their widths can be optimized for overall process tolerance including aberration sensitivity and exposure latitude. For exposure with a wavelength of 248 nm and a numerical aperture of 0.68, the optimal number of phase regions is two, with widths between 100 nm and 200 nm. These auxiliary phase regions do not affect the final pattern if a light-field trim mask is used. No extra processing step is necessary. With the enhanced alternating PSM technique, isolated lines of average dimension as small as 36 nm can be delineated using 248 urn lithography with a 3o- linewidth control of 13.4 urn. The mean critical dimension of 36 urn corresponds to k1 = 0.1.published_or_final_versio

Cross cultural validation : the Chinese version of the Clinical Dementia Rating scale

Author name used in this publication: Claudia K. Y. LaiAuthor name used in this publication: Jenny C.C. Chung2003-2004 > Academic research: refereed > Publication in refereed journalVersion of RecordPublishe

On staying grounded and avoiding Quixotic dead ends

The 15 articles in this special issue on The Representation of Concepts illustrate the rich variety of theoretical positions and supporting research that characterize the area. Although much agreement exists among contributors, much disagreement exists as well, especially about the roles of grounding and abstraction in conceptual processing. I first review theoretical approaches raised in these articles that I believe are Quixotic dead ends, namely, approaches that are principled and inspired but likely to fail. In the process, I review various theories of amodal symbols, their distortions of grounded theories, and fallacies in the evidence used to support them. Incorporating further contributions across articles, I then sketch a theoretical approach that I believe is likely to be successful, which includes grounding, abstraction, flexibility, explaining classic conceptual phenomena, and making contact with real-world situations. This account further proposes that (1) a key element of grounding is neural reuse, (2) abstraction takes the forms of multimodal compression, distilled abstraction, and distributed linguistic representation (but not amodal symbols), and (3) flexible context-dependent representations are a hallmark of conceptual processing

Bioavailable testosterone predicts a lower risk of Alzheimer’s disease in older men: a 1-year cohort study

Oral Presentationpublished_or_final_versionThe 15th Annual Research Conference of the Department of Medicine, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, 16 January 2010. In Hong Kong Medical Journal, 2010, v. 16, suppl. 1, p. 16, abstract no. 1

PubMed-supported clinical term weighting approach for improving inter-patient similarity measure in diagnosis prediction

published_or_final_versio

Isolated hepatic actinomycosis: a case report

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Introduction</p> <p>Actinomyces are slow growing, non-spore forming, gram-positive, branching bacilli that thrive in anaerobic and microareophilic conditions. Actinomyces are more commonly associated with oral and cervicofacial infections. Hepatic involvement in infections of the abdomen (known as isolated hepatic actinomycosis) is rare, accounting for only 5% of all cases of actinomycosis.</p> <p>Case presentation</p> <p>We present the case of a 75-year-old Caucasian woman with a 3-month history of night sweats, fever, chills, abdominal bloating, anorexia, weight-loss, and early satiety. The patient was found to have isolated hepatic actinomycosis infection after undergoing a laparotomy with a biopsy of the liver. The patient has now recovered.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Isolated hepatic actinomycosis is a rare and often overlooked etiology for a liver mass. Given its subacute presentation and nondescript symptomatology, physicians should be aware of this differential and the potential pitfalls in diagnosis and management.</p

A Dynamic Noise Level Algorithm for Spectral Screening of Peptide MS/MS Spectra

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>High-throughput shotgun proteomics data contain a significant number of spectra from non-peptide ions or spectra of too poor quality to obtain highly confident peptide identifications. These spectra cannot be identified with any positive peptide matches in some database search programs or are identified with false positives in others. Removing these spectra can improve the database search results and lower computational expense.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>A new algorithm has been developed to filter tandem mass spectra of poor quality from shotgun proteomic experiments. The algorithm determines the noise level dynamically and independently for each spectrum in a tandem mass spectrometric data set. Spectra are filtered based on a minimum number of required signal peaks with a signal-to-noise ratio of 2. The algorithm was tested with 23 sample data sets containing 62,117 total spectra.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The spectral screening removed 89.0% of the tandem mass spectra that did not yield a peptide match when searched with the MassMatrix database search software. Only 6.0% of tandem mass spectra that yielded peptide matches considered to be true positive matches were lost after spectral screening. The algorithm was found to be very effective at removal of unidentified spectra in other database search programs including Mascot, OMSSA, and X!Tandem (75.93%-91.00%) with a small loss (3.59%-9.40%) of true positive matches.</p

Non-genetic expression of adolescent idiopathic scoliosis: a case report and review of the literature

Treating children with idiopathic scoliosis can amaze someone at the many different ways in which the deformity can present. Most authors state that genetics stipulates the course of adolescent idiopathic scoliosis. This is mainly based on the high concordance in monozygotic twins. However, there is indication that environmental factors have influences on adolescent idiopathic scoliosis. This is the first report in which a monozygotic twin pair is described concordant for idiopathic scoliosis but with different apical levels, magnitudes and age at detection of scoliosis which stresses the importance of environmental factors