BACKGROUND The blood oxygenation-level dependent (BOLD) functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) modality has been numerically simulated by calculating single voxel signals. However, the observation on single voxel signals cannot provide information regarding the spatial distribution of the signals. Specifically, a single BOLD voxel signal simulation cannot answer the fundamental question: ...

White matter is an essential component of the central nervous system and is of major concern in neurodegenerative diseases such as multiple sclerosis (MS). Recent MRI studies have explored the unique anisotropic magnetic properties of white matter using susceptibility tensor imaging. However, these measurements are inhibited in practice by the large number of different head orientations needed ...

The antimicrobial susceptibility profiles of 76 Streptococcus agalactiae (Group B Streptococci [GBS]) isolates from vaginal specimens of pregnant women near term were correlated to their genotypes generated by Random Amplified Polymorphic DNA analysis and their virulence factors encoding genes cylE, lmb, scpB, rib, and bca by PCR. Based on the distribution of the susceptibility patterns, six pr...

In the present study, we examined whether hypoxia-inducible factor-1α (HIF-1α) polymorphisms are associated with the susceptibility to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). One hundred and twenty patients with COPD and 112 healthy controls were recruited from the Han population in Southern China. Polymerase chain reaction-restriction fragment length polymorphism was used to assess the C...

In this paper we investigate a susceptible-infected-susceptible (SIS) epidemic model describing data dissemination in opportunistic networks with heterogeneous setting of transmission parameters. We obtained the estimation of the final epidemic size assuming that amount of data transferred between network nodes possesses a Pareto distribution, implying scale-free properties. In this context, mo...

A low magnetic Zr-1Mo alloy was fabricated by a powder bed fusion (PBF) process using a fiber laser. The microstructure, surface morphology, and pore distribution of the as-built Zr-1Mo alloy were observed. Its magnetic susceptibility and Vickers hardness were evaluated by magnetic susceptibility balance and a microindentation tester, respectively. The as-built Zr-1Mo alloy mainly consisted of ...

In this proceedings, we summarize our work on the determination of the topological susceptibility and zero mode size distribution of SU(2) and SU(3) gauge fields using the overlap formalism. Most of this work has appeared in print [1]. We will focus here on new results which are extensions of the published work, namely the topological susceptibility for SU(2) pure gauge theory, the zero mode si...

We report a Monte Carlo study of the effects of fluctuations in the bond distribution of Ising spin glasses in a transverse magnetic field, in the paramagnetic phase in the T → 0 limit. Rare, strong fluctuations give rise to Griffiths singularities, which can dominate the zero-temperature behavior of these quantum systems, as originally demonstrated by McCoy for one-dimensional (d = 1) systems....