Recent technical advances lead to the coupling of PET and MRI scanners, enabling one to acquire functional and anatomical data simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a tight frame based PET-MRI joint reconstruction model via the joint sparsity of tight frame coefficients. In addition, a nonconvex balanced approach is adopted to take the different regularities of PET and MRI images into account. To solve the nonconvex and nonsmooth model, a proximal alternating minimization algorithm is proposed, and the global convergence is present based on the Kurdyka--Łojasiewicz property. Finally, the numerical experiments show that our proposed models achieve better performance over the existing PET-MRI joint reconstruction models.

We review some recent developments in Chern-Simons theory on a hyperbolic 3-manifold M with complex gauge group G. We focus on the case G=SL(N,C) and with M a knot complement. The main result presented in this note is the cluster partition function, a computational tool that uses cluster algebra techniques to evaluate the Chern-Simons path integral. We also review various applications and open questions regarding the cluster partition function and some of its relation with string theory.

The structural variations of multidomain proteins with flexible parts mediate many biological processes, and a structure ensemble can be determined by selecting a weighted combination of representative structures from a simulated structure pool, producing the best fit to experimental constraints such as interatomic distance. In this study, a hybrid structure-based and physics-based atomistic force field with an efficient sampling strategy is adopted to simulate a model di-domain protein against experimental paramagnetic relaxation enhancement (PRE) data that correspond to distance constraints. The molecular dynamics simulations produce a wide range of conformations depicted on a protein energy landscape. Subsequently, a conformational ensemble recovered with low-energy structures and the minimum-size restraint is identified in good agreement with experimental PRE rates, and the result is also supported by chemical shift perturbations and small-angle X-ray scattering data. It is illustrated that the regularizations of energy and ensemble-size prevent an arbitrary interpretation of protein conformations. Moreover, energy is found to serve as a critical control to refine the structure pool and prevent data overfitting, because the absence of energy regularization exposes ensemble construction to the noise from high-energy structures and causes a more ambiguous representation of protein conformations. Finally, we perform structure-ensemble optimizations with a topology-based structure pool, to enhance the understanding on the ensemble results from different sources of pool candidates.

Quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM) uses the phase data in magnetic resonance signals to visualize a three-dimensional susceptibility distribution by solving the magnetic field to susceptibility inverse problem. Due to the presence of zeros of the integration kernel in the frequency domain, QSM is an ill-posed inverse problem. Although numerous regularization-based models have been proposed to overcome this problem, incompatibility in the field data, which leads to deterioration of the recovery, has not received enough attention. In this paper, we show that the data acquisition process of QSM inherently generates a harmonic incompatibility in the measured local field. Based on this discovery, we propose a novel regularization-based susceptibility reconstruction model with an additional sparsity-based regularization term on the harmonic incompatibility. Numerical experiments show that the proposed method achieves better performance than existing approaches.

Learning rate is arguably the most important hyper-parameter to tune when training a neural network. As manually setting right learning rate remains a cumbersome process, adaptive learning rate algorithms aim at automating such a process. Motivated by the success of the Barzilai–Borwein (BB) step-size method in many gradient descent methods for solving convex problems, this paper aims at investigating the potential of the BB method for training neural networks. With strong motivation from related convergence analysis, the BB method is generalized to adaptive learning rate of mini-batch gradient descent. The experiments showed that, in contrast to many existing methods, the proposed BB method is highly insensitive to initial learning rate, especially in terms of generalization performance. Also, the BB method showed its advantages on both learning speed and generalization performance over other available methods.