There is an unmet medical need to identify neuroimaging biomarkers that is able to accurately diagnose and monitor Alzheimer's disease (AD) at very early stages and assess the response to AD-modifying therapies. To a certain extent, volumetric and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies can detect changes in structure, cerebral blood flow and blood oxygenation that are able to distinguish AD and mild cognitive impairment (MCI) subjects from normal controls. However, it has been challenging to use fully automated MRI analytic methods to identify potential AD neuroimaging biomarkers. We have thus proposed a method based on independent component analysis (ICA), for studying potential AD-related MR image features, coupled with the use of support vector machine (SVM) for classifying scans into categories of AD, MCI, and normal control (NC) subjects. The MRI data were selected from Open Access Series of Imaging Studies (OASIS) and the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) databases. The experimental results showed that our ICA-based method can differentiate AD and MCI subjects from normal controls, although further methodological improvement in the analytic method and inclusion of additional variables may be required for optimal classification.

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In this paper, we construct the bilinear identities for the wave functions of an extended Kadomtsev-Petviashvili (KP) hierarchy, which is the KP hierarchy with particular extended flows. By introducing an auxiliary parameter, whose flow corresponds to the so-called squared eigenfunction symmetry of KP hierarchy, we find the tau-function for this extended KP hierarchy. It is shown that the bilinear identities will generate all the Hirota's bilinear equations for the zero-curvature forms of the extended KP hierarchy, which includes two types of KP equation with self-consistent sources (KPSCS). It seems that the Hirota's bilinear equations obtained in this paper for KPSCS are in a simpler form by comparing with the results by X.B. Hu and H.Y. Wang.

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There have been many attempts to define the notion of quasilocal mass for a spacelike 2-surface in spacetime by the Hamilton-Jacobi analysis. The essential difficulty in this approach is to identify the right choice of the background configuration to be subtracted from the physical Hamiltonian. Quasilocal mass should be nonnegative for surfaces in general spacetime and zero for surfaces in flat spacetime. In this letter, we propose a new definition of gauge-independent quasilocal mass and prove that it has the desired properties.