arXiv subjects

Nathan Cahill

Publications and source records attributed to Nathan Cahill.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

First fast radio burst search campaign at the Argentine Institute of Radio Astronomy

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are intense millisecond-duration radio transients of extragalactic origin whose physical nature remains under active investigation, and which also serve as probes of the intergalactic medium. We report on the first FRB search campaign carried out at the Argentine Institute of Radio Astronomy (IAR) between December 2024 and March 2026, targeting nearby galaxy superclusters in the southern sky. We observed fields in the Ophiuchus, Shapley, and Sculptor/Phoenix supercluster regions with one of the two 30~m antennas of the IAR, using a ROACH-based backend with 400~MHz of bandwidth centred at 1400~MHz and a time resolution of 41--82~$\mu$s, for a total net observing time of 212~h. The data were searched for dispersed single pulses with \texttt{PRESTO} in the dispersion measure range $100 \leq \mathrm{DM} \leq 500$, and candidates were classified with the FETCH machine learning classifier. The pipeline was validated on archival Parkes data containing known FRBs and on synthetic bursts injected into IAR observations. One FRB candidate, FRB~20251018, was identified on 18 October 2025 in an observation pointed towards the galaxy cluster A2870, in the Phoenix supercluster, with a dispersion measure of $243$, a signal-to-noise ratio of 8.2, and a FETCH probability of $p=0.99$. To the best of our knowledge, this would be the first FRB detected from South America. A set of more marginal candidates is also presented. These results demonstrate the capability of the IAR antennas to detect FRBs and support the continuation and extension of the monitoring campaign, including coincident dual-antenna observations and cross-matches with gravitational-wave events and electromagnetic transients.

astro-ph.HE↗

arXiv2021

Vela Pulsar: Single Pulses Analysis with Machine Learning Techniques

We study individual pulses of Vela (PSR\ B0833-45\,/\,J0835-4510) from daily observations of over three hours (around 120,000 pulses per observation), performed simultaneously with the two radio telescopes at the Argentine Institute of Radioastronomy. We select 4 days of observations in January-March 2021 and study their statistical properties with machine learning techniques. We first use density based DBSCAN clustering techniques, associating pulses mainly by amplitudes, and find a correlation between higher amplitudes and earlier arrival times. We also find a weaker (polarization dependent) correlation with the mean width of the pulses. We identify clusters of the so-called mini-giant pulses, with $\sim10\times$ the average pulse amplitude. We then perform an independent study, with Self-Organizing Maps (SOM) clustering techniques. We use Variational AutoEncoder (VAE) reconstruction of the pulses to separate them clearly from the noise and select one of the days of observation to train VAE and apply it to thre rest of the observations. We use SOM to determine 4 clusters of pulses per day per radio telescope and conclude that our main results are robust and self-consistent. These results support models for emitting regions at different heights (separated each by roughly a hundred km) in the pulsar magnetosphere. We also model the pulses amplitude distribution with interstellar scintillation patterns at the inter-pulses time-scale finding a characterizing exponent $n_{\mathrm{ISS}}\sim7-10$. In the appendices we discuss independent checks of hardware systematics with the simultaneous use of the two radio telescopes in different one-polarization / two-polarizations configurations. We also provide a detailed analysis of the processes of radio-interferences cleaning and individual pulse folding.

astro-ph.HE↗

arXiv2017

Robust Spatial Filtering with Graph Convolutional Neural Networks

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have recently led to incredible breakthroughs on a variety of pattern recognition problems. Banks of finite impulse response filters are learned on a hierarchy of layers, each contributing more abstract information than the previous layer. The simplicity and elegance of the convolutional filtering process makes them perfect for structured problems such as image, video, or voice, where vertices are homogeneous in the sense of number, location, and strength of neighbors. The vast majority of classification problems, for example in the pharmaceutical, homeland security, and financial domains are unstructured. As these problems are formulated into unstructured graphs, the heterogeneity of these problems, such as number of vertices, number of connections per vertex, and edge strength, cannot be tackled with standard convolutional techniques. We propose a novel neural learning framework that is capable of handling both homogeneous and heterogeneous data, while retaining the benefits of traditional CNN successes. Recently, researchers have proposed variations of CNNs that can handle graph data. In an effort to create learnable filter banks of graphs, these methods either induce constraints on the data or require preprocessing. As opposed to spectral methods, our framework, which we term Graph-CNNs, defines filters as polynomials of functions of the graph adjacency matrix. Graph-CNNs can handle both heterogeneous and homogeneous graph data, including graphs having entirely different vertex or edge sets. We perform experiments to validate the applicability of Graph-CNNs to a variety of structured and unstructured classification problems and demonstrate state-of-the-art results on document and molecule classification problems.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2016

Integrating Atlas and Graph Cut Methods for LV Segmentation from Cardiac Cine MRI

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) has evolved as a clinical standard-of-care imaging modality for cardiac morphology, function assessment, and guidance of cardiac interventions. All these applications rely on accurate extraction of the myocardial tissue and blood pool from the imaging data. Here we propose a framework for left ventricle (LV) segmentation from cardiac cine-MRI. First, we segment the LV blood pool using iterative graph cuts, and subsequently use this information to segment the myocardium. We formulate the segmentation procedure as an energy minimization problem in a graph subject to the shape prior obtained by label propagation from an average atlas using affine registration. The proposed framework has been validated on 30 patient cardiac cine-MRI datasets available through the STACOM LV segmentation challenge and yielded fast, robust, and accurate segmentation results.

cs.CV↗