arXiv subjects

Frank Lee

Publications and source records attributed to Frank Lee.

15 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Digitally enriching a screening population for pancreatic cancer using routine blood-based measures and clinical histories

Earlier detection of pancreatic cancer is key to enabling wider access to curative treatment and reducing cancer deaths; however, screening is presently not viable. Latent indicators of pathology are evident in an individual's disease and blood test trajectories and may predict the development of pancreatic cancer. Longitudinal sequences of coded diagnoses and blood test values accrued by patients throughout their clinical interactions were used to train a custom Transformer-based neural network with a multi-head attention mechanism to predict risk of pancreatic cancer with a multi-year lead time and risk-stratify populations for targeted screening. The cohort comprised 6,017 adults with pancreatic cancer and 177,081 controls (overall median age 75, 45% female) with median 12 years (interquartile range 6.9-16.2) of medical history prior to pancreatic cancer diagnosis. External validation via leave-one-site-out, out-of-sample testing predicting pancreatic cancer 1-, 2-, and 3-years prior to diagnosis demonstrated mean area under the receiver operating characteristic of 0.837 (95% confidence interval 0.827-0.848), 0.797 (95% confidence interval 0.782-0.813), and 0.760 (95% confidence interval 0.745-0.776), respectively. Estimated pancreatic cancer risks were well-calibrated (calibration plot slope 1.08, intercept of -0.077; Brier score 0.025), and a Bayesian population pancreatic cancer prevalence update allows estimated cancer risk outputs to be transportable across settings. At testing, a screening threshold of >3.3% risk of pancreatic cancer in 1-year offered a diagnostic odds ratio of 18.2. Our work therefore lays the foundation for a first population-level digital enrichment tool to widen access to curative-intent management of pancreatic cancer.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

Unidirectional domain growth of hexagonal boron nitride thin films

Two-dimensional van der Waals (2D-vdW) layered hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) has gained tremendous research interest over recent years due to its unconventional domain growth morphology, fascinating properties and application potentials as an excellent dielectric layer for 2D-based nano-electronics. However, the unidirectional domain growth of h-BN thin films directly on insulating substrates remains significantly challenging because of high-bonding anisotropicity and complex growth kinetics than the conventional thin films growth, thus resulting in the formation of randomly oriented domains morphology, and hindering its usefulness in integrated nano-devices. Here, ultra-wide bandgap h-BN thin films are grown directly on low-miscut atomically smooth highly insulating c-plane sapphire substrates (without using any metal catalytic layer) by pulsed laser deposition, showing remarkable unidirectional triangular-shape domains morphology. This unidirectional domain growth is attributed to the step-edge guided nucleation caused by reducing the film-substrate interfacial symmetry and energy, thereby breaking the degeneracy of nucleation sites of random domains, as revealed by the density functional theory (DFT) calculations. Through extensive characterizations, we further demonstrate the excellent single crystal-like functional properties of films. Our findings might pave the way for feasible large-area direct growth of electronic-quality h-BN thin films on insulating substrates for high-performance 2D-electronics, and in addition would be beneficial for hetero engineering of 2D-vdW materials with emergent phenomena.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2022

Unravelling the room temperature growth of two-dimensional h-BN nanosheets for multifunctional applications

Room temperature growth of two-dimensional van der Waals (2D-vdW) materials is indispensable for state-of-the-art nanotechnology. The low temperature growth supersedes the requirement of elevated growth temperature accompanied with high thermal budgets. Moreover, for electronic applications, low or room temperature growth reduces the possibility of intrinsic film-substrate interfacial thermal diffusion related deterioration of functional properties and consequent device performance. Here, we demonstrated the growth of ultrawide-bandgap boron nitride (BN) at room temperature by using the pulsed laser deposition (PLD) process and demonstrated various functionalities for potential applications. Comprehensive chemical, spectroscopic and microscopic characterization confirms the growth of ordered nanosheet-like hexagonal BN. Functionally, nanosheets show hydrophobicity, high lubricity (low coefficient of friction), low refractive index within the visible to near-infrared wavelength range, and room temperature single-photon quantum emission. Our work unveils an important step that brings a plethora of applications potential for room temperature grown h-BN nanosheets as it can be feasible on any given substrate, thus creating a scenario for h-BN on demand at frugal thermal budget.

physics.app-ph↗

arXiv2015

Pion electric polarizability from lattice QCD

Electromagnetic polarizabilities are important parameters for understanding the interaction between photons and hadrons. For pions these quantities are poorly constrained experimentally since they can only be measured indirectly. New experiments at CERN and Jefferson Lab are planned that will measure the polarizabilities more precisely. Lattice QCD can be used to compute these quantities directly in terms of quark and gluons degrees of freedom, using the background field method. We present results for the electric polarizability for two different quark masses, light enough to connect to chiral perturbation theory. These are currently the lightest quark masses used in polarizability studies.

hep-lat↗

arXiv2014

Electric polarizability of neutral hadrons from dynamical lattice QCD ensembles

We present a valence calculation of the electric polarizability of the neutron, neutral pion, and neutral kaon on two dynamically generated nHYP-clover ensembles. The pion masses for these ensembles are 227(2) MeV and 306(1) MeV, which are the lowest ones used in polarizability studies. This is part of a program geared towards determining these parameters at the physical point. We carry out a high statistics calculation that allows us to: (1) perform an extrapolation of the kaon polarizability to the physical point; we find $α_K =0.269(43)\times10^{-4}$fm$^{3}$, (2) quantitatively compare our neutron polarizability results with predictions from $χ$PT, and (3) analyze the dependence on both the valence and sea quark masses. The kaon polarizability varies slowly with the light quark mass and the extrapolation can be done with high confidence.

hep-lat↗

arXiv2013

Valence calculation of the electric polarizability on nHYP-Clover ensembles

We present preliminary calculations for the electric polarizability of the neutral pion and neutron on three dynamically generated nHYP-Clover ensembles. We use two different pion masses ($m_π \simeq 300$ and 220 MeV) to gauge the chiral behavior. The effects of partial quenching are analyzed by computing a string of partial quenched valence masses for each ensemble. We also analyzed the volume dependence using elongated lattices, where the elongation is in the direction of the electric field.

hep-lat↗

arXiv2012

Sea Contributions to Hadron Electric Polarizabilities through Reweighting

As part of our ongoing lattice study of the electric polarizabilities of hadrons using the background field approach, we use reweighting to examine the effect of the field on the sea quarks. As with other reweighting studies, the chief difficulty lies in the construction of a stochastic estimate of the ratio of the fermion determinants. In contrast to the case of reweighting in the quark mass, these estimators converge extremely slowly, and are resistant to common variance-reduction techniques such as low-mode subtraction. However, it is possible to construct an alternate estimator, taking advantage of the fact that we are interested in only perturbatively small fields; this estimator is susceptible to a variance-reduction technique based on a hopping parameter expansion.

hep-lat↗

arXiv2011

Electric polarizability of hadrons with overlap fermions on multi-GPUs

Electric polarizability is an important parameter for the internal structure of hadrons. Previous studies of polarizabilities have been done at relatively heavy pion masses, leaving the chiral region largely unexplored. In this report, we use overlap fermions which are known to be computationally demanding to properly capture the chiral dynamics. We present an implementation strategy to construct overlap on multi-GPUs. We find that our GPU code has an equivalent of \sim30 CPU cores to 1 GPU. We also present preliminary results for the polarizability of the neutral pion.

hep-lat↗

arXiv2010

Hadron electric polarizability -- finite volume corrections

We use the background field method to extract the polarizability for the neutral "pion". In our previous study we found that the polarizability for this system is negative which is believed to be a finite volume artifact. To address this issue, we carry out simulations for different lattice sizes and we also look at the influence of the boundary conditions on these results. We find that for pion masses lower than 400 MeV the polarizability remains negative even on larger lattices. An infinite volume extrapolation is attempted, but the results are not conclusive due mainly to a lack of an analytical form for the finite volume corrections for this system.

hep-lat↗

arXiv2007

Synthesis, characterization, and application of carbon cubes

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have attracted increasing attention because of their unique structural, mechanical, and electronic properties. Surface chemistry modifications are also useful and critical to manipulate the adsorptive properties of CNTs and develop their potential of environmental application. Therefore, the main objectives of this study were to investigate the optimal synthesis methods or characteristics identification of multiwall CNTs (MWCNTs) and the environmental application of lead ions adsorptive removal by CNTs. Experimentally, the MWCNTs of well-graphited walls were obtained with reductive potassium metals of catalytic hexachlorobenzene-thermal routes in the presence of Co/Ni catalyst precursors at 503-623 K for 8- 12 hr. The diameters of MWCNTs ranged of 30-100 nm by TEM microphotos. In addition, fine structures or surface chemical modification of MWCNTs or Co/Ni precursors were further identified by EDS, XRPD, X-ray absorption near edge structural (XANES) or extended Xray absorption fine structural (EXAFS) spectroscopy. 1.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2005

Locality and Scaling of Quenched Overlap Fermions

The overlap fermion offers the tremendous advantage of exact chiral symmetry on the lattice, but is numerically intensive. This can be made affordable while still providing large lattice volumes, by using coarse lattice spacing, given that good scaling and localization properties are established. Here, using overlap fermions on quenched Iwasaki gauge configurations, we demonstrate directly that the overlap Dirac operator's range is comfortably small in lattice units for each of the lattice spacings 0.20 fm, 0.17 fm, and 0.13 fm (and scales to zero in physical units in the continuum limit). In particular, our direct results contradict recent speculation that an inverse lattice spacing of $1 {\rm GeV}$ is too low to have satisfactory localization. Furthermore, hadronic masses (available on the two coarser lattices) scale very well.

hep-lat↗

arXiv2004

Improved Measure of Local Chirality

It is popular to probe the structure of the QCD vacuum indirectly by studying individual fermion eigenmodes, because this provides a natural way to filter out UV fluctuations. The double-peaking in the distribution of the local chiral orientation parameter (X) has been offered as evidence, by some, in support of a particular model of the vacuum. Here we caution that the X-distribution peaking varies significantly with various versions of the definition of X. Furthermore, each distribution varies little from that resulting from a random reshuffling of the left-handed (and independently the right-handed) fields, which destroys any QCD-induced left-right correlation; that is, the double-peaking is mostly a phase-space effect. We propose a new universal definition of the X parameter whose distribution is uniform for randomly reshuffled fields. Any deviations from uniformity for actual data can then be directly attributable to QCD-induced dynamics. We find that the familiar double peak disappears.

hep-lat↗

arXiv2003

An Algorithm for Obtaining Reliable Priors for Constrained-Curve Fits

We introduce the ``Sequential Empirical Bayes Method'', an adaptive constrained-curve fitting procedure for extracting reliable priors. These are then used in standard augmented-chi-square fits on separate data. This better stabilizes fits to lattice QCD overlap-fermion data at very low quark mass where a priori values are not otherwise known. We illustrate the efficacy of the method with data from overlap fermions, on a quenched $16^3\times 28$ lattice with spatial size La=3.2 fm and pion mass as low as $\sim$ 180 MeV.

hep-lat↗

arXiv2002

Quenched Chiral Log and Light Quark Mass from Overlap Fermions

We study the quenched chiral behavior of the pion with mass as low as $\approx 180$ MeV. The calculation is done on a quenched lattice of size $16^3\times 28$ and $a = 0.2$ fm with 80 configurations using overlap fermions and an improved gauge action. Using an improved constrained curve fitting technique, we find that the ground state pseudoscalar mass versus bare quark mass behavior is well controlled with small statistical errors; this permits a reliable fit of the quenched chiral log effects, a determination of the chiral log parameter ($δ= 0.26(3)$), and an estimate of the renormalized mass of the light quark ($m^{\bar{MS}}(μ=2 {\rm GeV}) = 3.7(3) {\rm MeV}$).

hep-lat↗

arXiv2001

Quenched Chiral Behavior of Hadrons with Overlap Fermions

We study the quenched chiral behavior of hadrons with the pseudoscalar mass as low as $\approx 280$ MeV. We look for quenched chiral logs in the pion mass, determine the renormalized quark mass, and observe quenched artifacts in the $a_0$ and $N^*$ propagators. The calculation is done on a quenched lattice of size $20^4$ and $a = 0.148(2)$ fm using overlap fermions and an improved gauge action.

hep-lat↗