Measurement of flow volume in the presence of reverse flow with ultrasound speckle decorrelation

Direct measurement of volumetric flow rate in the cardiovascular system with ultrasound is valuable but has been a challenge because most current 2-D flow imaging techniques are only able to estimate the flow velocity in the scanning plane (in-plane). Our recent study demonstrated that high frame rate contrast ultrasound and speckle decorrelation (SDC) can be used to accurately measure the speed of flow going through the scanning plane (through-plane). The volumetric flow could then be calculated by integrating over the luminal area, when the blood vessel was scanned from the transverse view. However, a key disadvantage of this SDC method is that it cannot distinguish the direction of the through-plane flow, which limited its applications to blood vessels with unidirectional flow. Physiologic flow in the cardiovascular system could be bidirectional due to its pulsatility, geometric features, or under pathologic situations. In this study, we proposed a method to distinguish the through-plane flow direction by inspecting the flow within the scanning plane from a tilted transverse view. This method was tested on computer simulations and experimental flow phantoms. It was found that the proposed method could detect flow direction and improved the estimation of the flow volume, reducing the overestimation from over 100% to less than 15% when there was flow reversal. This method showed significant improvement over the current SDC method in volume flow estimation and can be applied to a wider range of clinical applications where bidirectional flow exists

On low-sampling-rate Kramers-Moyal coefficients

We analyze the impact of the sampling interval on the estimation of Kramers-Moyal coefficients. We obtain the finite-time expressions of these coefficients for several standard processes. We also analyze extreme situations such as the independence and no-fluctuation limits that constitute useful references. Our results aim at aiding the proper extraction of information in data-driven analysis.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figure

Effects of polarization and permittivity gradients and other parameters on the anomalous vertical shift behavior of graded ferroelectric thin films

Author name used in this publication: Y. ZhouAuthor name used in this publication: C. H. LamAuthor name used in this publication: F. G. Shin2005-2006 > Academic research: refereed > Publication in refereed journalVersion of RecordPublishe

Shear Bond Strength and Remineralisation Effect of a Casein Phosphopeptide-Amorphous Calcium Phosphate-Modified Glass Ionomer Cement on Artificial “Caries-Affected” Dentine

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Mechanisms of imprint effect on ferroelectric thin films

Author name used in this publication: Y. ZhouAuthor name used in this publication: C. H. LamAuthor name used in this publication: F. G. Shin2005-2006 > Academic research: refereed > Publication in refereed journalVersion of RecordPublishe

Ultrasonic extraction of flavonoids and phenolics from loquat (Eriobotrya japonica Lindl.) flowers

Ethanol was used to extract flavonoids and phenolics from loquat (Eriobotrya japonica Lindl. cv. Ruantiaobaisha) flowers with ultrasonic pharmaceutical managing machine. Single-factor and orthogonal experiment were used to investigate the optimum extraction condition. The results showed that, the combination of 30°C, 80 min, 60% ethanol and 1:40 material ratio was optimum extraction condition with the highest yields of flavonoids and phenolics at 47 kHz/500 W. Under the optimum extraction condition, two consecutive extractions was enough, the extraction rates of flavonoids and phenolics were all more than 90%, with the contents of 10.59 and 102.02 mg/g dry weight, respectively.Key words: Eriobotrya japonica, flower, flavonoids, phenolics, ultrasonic extraction

Sociocultural Norm Similarities and Differences via Situational Alignment and Explainable Textual Entailment

Designing systems that can reason across cultures requires that they are grounded in the norms of the contexts in which they operate. However, current research on developing computational models of social norms has primarily focused on American society. Here, we propose a novel approach to discover and compare descriptive social norms across Chinese and American cultures. We demonstrate our approach by leveraging discussions on a Chinese Q&A platform (Zhihu) and the existing SocialChemistry dataset as proxies for contrasting cultural axes, align social situations cross-culturally, and extract social norms from texts using in-context learning. Embedding Chain-of-Thought prompting in a human-AI collaborative framework, we build a high-quality dataset of 3,069 social norms aligned with social situations across Chinese and American cultures alongside corresponding free-text explanations. To test the ability of models to reason about social norms across cultures, we introduce the task of explainable social norm entailment, showing that existing models under 3B parameters have significant room for improvement in both automatic and human evaluation. Further analysis of cross-cultural norm differences based on our dataset shows empirical alignment with the social orientations framework, revealing several situational and descriptive nuances in norms across these cultures.Comment: EMNLP 2023 Main Conference (Long Paper

Understanding the Epidemiology of Heart Failure to Improve Management Practices: An Asia-Pacific Perspective

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Quantum Computing with Very Noisy Devices

In theory, quantum computers can efficiently simulate quantum physics, factor large numbers and estimate integrals, thus solving otherwise intractable computational problems. In practice, quantum computers must operate with noisy devices called ``gates'' that tend to destroy the fragile quantum states needed for computation. The goal of fault-tolerant quantum computing is to compute accurately even when gates have a high probability of error each time they are used. Here we give evidence that accurate quantum computing is possible with error probabilities above 3% per gate, which is significantly higher than what was previously thought possible. However, the resources required for computing at such high error probabilities are excessive. Fortunately, they decrease rapidly with decreasing error probabilities. If we had quantum resources comparable to the considerable resources available in today's digital computers, we could implement non-trivial quantum computations at error probabilities as high as 1% per gate.Comment: 47 page