Accurate and consistent skull stripping of serial brain MR images is of great importance in longitudinal studies that aim to detect subtle brain morphological changes. To avoid inconsistency and the potential bias introduced by independently performing skull-stripping for each time-point image, we propose an effective method that is capable of skull-stripping serial brain MR images simultaneous...

OBJECTIVES Little biomechanical information is available about kinematically aligned (KA) total knee arthroplasty (TKA). The purpose of this study was to simulate the kinematics and kinetics after KA TKA and mechanically aligned (MA) TKA with four different limb alignments. MATERIALS AND METHODS Bone models were constructed from one volunteer (normal) and three patients with three different k...

The causal and metric structure of globally hyperbolic spacetimes is investigated from a C∗-algebra point of view related to part of Connes’ noncommutative geometry programme. No foliation of the spacetime by means of spacelike surfaces is employed, but the complete Lorentzian geometry is considered. Several results are produced. As a first result, Connes’ functional formula of the distance is ...

We expand on the idea that spacetime signature should be treated as a dy-namical degree of freedom in quantum field theory. It has been argued that the probability distribution for signature, induced by massless free fields, is peaked at the Lorentzian value uniquely in D=4 dimensions. This argument is reviewed, and certain consistency constraints on the generalized signature (i.e. the tangent ...

We present an atomic prism spectrometer that utilizes the steep linear dispersion between two strongly absorbing hyperfine resonances of rubidium. We resolve spectral lines 50 MHz apart and, utilizing a larger part of the available spectrum than only between the two resonances, we spatially separate collinear pump, signal, and idler beams resulting from a four-wave mixing process. Due to the hi...

Helfer in [6] was the first to produce an example of a spacelike Lorentzian geodesic with a continuum of conjugate points. In this paper we show the following result: given an interval [a, b] of IR and any closed subset F of IR contained in ]a, b], then there exists a Lorentzian manifold (M, g) and a spacelike geodesic γ : [a, b] → M such that γ(t) is conjugate to γ(a) along γ iff t ∈ F .

We consider a system of globally coupled active rotators near the excitable regime. The system displays a transition to a state of collective firing induced by disorder. We show that this transition is found generically for any diversity distribution with well-defined moments. Singularly, for the Lorentzian distribution (widely used in Kuramoto-like systems) the transition is not present. This ...

We apply the “consistent discretization” technique to the Regge action for (Euclidean and Lorentzian) general relativity in arbitrary number of dimensions. The result is a well defined canonical theory that is free of constraints and where the dynamics is implemented as a canonical transformation. In the Lorentzian case, the framework appears to be naturally free of the “spikes” that plague tra...

Quantum energy inequalities (QEIs) were established by Flanagan for the massless scalar field on two-dimensional Lorentzian spacetimes globally conformal to Minkowski space. We extend his result to all two-dimensional globally hyperbolic Lorentzian spacetimes and use it to show that flat spacetime QEIs give a good approximation to the curved spacetime results on sampling timescales short in com...

We study an anisotropic simplicial minisuperspace model with a cosmological constant and a massive scalar field. After obtaining the classical solutions we then compute the semiclassical approximation of the no-boundary wave function of the Universe along a steepest descents contour passing through classical Lorentzian solutions. The oscillatory behaviour of the resulting wave funtion is consis...