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Uncertainties from experiments and models render multi-modal difficulties in model calibrations. Bayesian inference and \textsc{mcmc} algorithm have been applied to obtain posterior distributions of model parameters upon uncertainty. However, multi-modality leads to difficulty in convergence criterion of parallel \textsc{mcmc} sampling chains. The commonly applied $\widehat{R}$ diagnostic does not behave well when multiple sampling chains are evolving to different modes. Both partitional and hierarchical clustering methods has been combined to the traditional $\widehat{R}$ diagnostic to deal with sampling of target distributions that are rough and multi-modal. It is observed that the distributions of binding parameters and pore diffusion of particle parameters are multi-modal. Therefore, the steric mass-action model used to describe ion-exchange effects of the model protein, lysozyme, on the \textsc{sp} Sepharose \textsc{ff} stationary phase might not be fully capable in certain experimental conditions, as model uncertainty from steric mass-action would result in multi-modality., Comment: 25 pages

To investigate whether the pleurae, airways and vessels surrounding a nodule on non-contrast computed tomography (CT) can discriminate benign and malignant pulmonary nodules. The LIDC-IDRI dataset, one of the largest publicly available CT database, was exploited for study. A total of 1556 nodules from 694 patients were involved in statistical analysis, where nodules with average scorings <3 and >3 were respectively denoted as benign and malignant. Besides, 339 nodules from 113 patients with diagnosis ground-truth were independently evaluated. Computer algorithms were developed to segment pulmonary structures and quantify the distances to pleural surface, airways and vessels, as well as the counting number and normalized volume of airways and vessels near a nodule. Odds ratio (OR) and Chi-square (\chi^2) testing were performed to demonstrate the correlation between features of surrounding structures and nodule malignancy. A non-parametric receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis was conducted in logistic regression to evaluate discrimination ability of each structure. For benign and malignant groups, the average distances from nodules to pleural surface, airways and vessels are respectively (6.56, 5.19), (37.08, 26.43) and (1.42, 1.07) mm. The correlation between nodules and the counting number of airways and vessels that contact or project towards nodules are respectively (OR=22.96, \chi^2=105.04) and (OR=7.06, \chi^2=290.11). The correlation between nodules and the volume of airways and vessels are (OR=9.19, \chi^2=159.02) and (OR=2.29, \chi^2=55.89). The areas-under-curves (AUCs) for pleurae, airways and vessels are respectively 0.5202, 0.6943 and 0.6529. Our results show that malignant nodules are often surrounded by more pulmonary structures compared with benign ones, suggesting that features of these structures could be viewed as lung cancer biomarkers., Comment: 33 pages, 3 figures, Submitted for review

A black hole X-ray binary produces hard X-ray radiation from its corona and disk when the accreting matter heats up. During an outburst, the disk and corona co-evolves with each other. However, such an evolution is still unclear in both its geometry and dynamics. Here we report the unusual decrease of the reflection fraction in MAXI J1820+070, which is the ratio of the coronal intensity illuminating the disk to the coronal intensity reaching the observer, as the corona is observed to contrast during the decay phase. We postulate a jet-like corona model, in which the corona can be understood as a standing shock where the material flowing through. In this dynamical scenario, the decrease of the reflection fraction is a signature of the corona's bulk velocity. Our findings suggest that as the corona is observed to get closer to the black hole, the coronal material might be outflowing faster., Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures; published in Nature Communications; An artist's impression of Figure 5 is updated here, and the animation is available at http://youbei.work/research/

This paper develops a grey-box approach to small-signal stability analysis of complex power systems that facilitates root-cause tracing without requiring disclosure of the full details of the internal control structure of apparatus connected to the system. The grey-box enables participation analysis in impedance models, which is popular in power electronics and increasingly accepted in power systems for stability analysis. The Impedance participation factor is proposed and defined in terms of the residue of the whole-system admittance matrix. It is proved that, the so defined impedance participation factor equals the sensitivity of the whole-system eigenvalue with respect to apparatus impedance. The classic state participation factor is related to the impedance participation factor via a chain-rule. Based on the chain-rule, a three-layer grey-box approach, with three degrees of transparency, is proposed for root-cause tracing to different depths, i.e. apparatus, states, and parameters, according to the available information. The association of impedance participation factor with eigenvalue sensitivity points to the re-tuning that would stabilize the system. The impedance participation factor can be measured in the field or calculated from the black-box impedance spectra with little prior knowledge required.

Training convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for segmentation of pulmonary airway, artery, and vein is challenging due to sparse supervisory signals caused by the severe class imbalance between tubular targets and background. We present a CNNs-based method for accurate airway and artery-vein segmentation in non-contrast computed tomography. It enjoys superior sensitivity to tenuous peripheral bronchioles, arterioles, and venules. The method first uses a feature recalibration module to make the best use of features learned from the neural networks. Spatial information of features is properly integrated to retain relative priority of activated regions, which benefits the subsequent channel-wise recalibration. Then, attention distillation module is introduced to reinforce representation learning of tubular objects. Fine-grained details in high-resolution attention maps are passing down from one layer to its previous layer recursively to enrich context. Anatomy prior of lung context map and distance transform map is designed and incorporated for better artery-vein differentiation capacity. Extensive experiments demonstrated considerable performance gains brought by these components. Compared with state-of-the-art methods, our method extracted much more branches while maintaining competitive overall segmentation performance. Codes and models are available at http://www.pami.sjtu.edu.cn/News/56, Comment: 15 pages, IEEE TMI