🍩 Database of Original & Non-Theoretical Uses of Topology

(found 2 matches in 0.001283s)

  1. Imaging-Based Representation and Stratification of Intra-Tumor Heterogeneity via Tree-Edit Distance (2022)

    Lara Cavinato, Matteo Pegoraro, Alessandra Ragni, Francesca Ieva
    Abstract Personalized medicine is the future of medical practice. In oncology, tumor heterogeneity assessment represents a pivotal step for effective treatment planning and prognosis prediction. Despite new procedures for DNA sequencing and analysis, non-invasive methods for tumor characterization are needed to impact on daily routine. On purpose, imaging texture analysis is rapidly scaling, holding the promise to surrogate histopathological assessment of tumor lesions. In this work, we propose a tree-based representation strategy for describing intra-tumor heterogeneity of patients affected by metastatic cancer. We leverage radiomics information extracted from PET/CT imaging and we provide an exhaustive and easily readable summary of the disease spreading. We exploit this novel patient representation to perform cancer subtyping according to hierarchical clustering technique. To this purpose, a new heterogeneity-based distance between trees is defined and applied to a case study of prostate cancer. Clusters interpretation is explored in terms of concordance with severity status, tumor burden and biological characteristics. Results are promising, as the proposed method outperforms current literature approaches. Ultimately, the proposed method draws a general analysis framework that would allow to extract knowledge from daily acquired imaging data of patients and provide insights for effective treatment planning.

  2. Loops Abound in the Cosmic Microwave Background: A \$4\sigma\$ Anomaly on Super-Horizon Scales (2021)

    Pratyush Pranav
    Abstract We present a topological analysis of the temperature fluctuation maps from the \emph\Planck 2020\ Data release 4 (DR4) based on the \texttt\NPIPE\ data processing pipeline. For comparison, we also present the topological characteristics of the maps from \emph\Planck 2018\ Data release 3 (DR3). We perform our analysis in terms of the homology characteristics of the maps, invoking relative homology to account for analysis in the presence of masks. We perform our analysis for a range of smoothing scales spanning sub- and super-horizon scales corresponding to \$FWHM = 5', 10', 20', 40', 80', 160', 320', 640'\$. Our main result indicates a significantly anomalous behavior of the loops in the observed maps compared to simulations that are modeled as isotopic and homogeneous Gaussian random fields. Specifically, we observe a \$4\sigma\$ deviation between the observation and simulations in the number of loops at \$FWHM = 320'\$ and \$FWHM = 640'\$, corresponding to super-horizon scales of \$5\$ degrees and larger. In addition, we also notice a mildly significant deviation at \$2\sigma\$ for all the topological descriptors for almost all the scales analyzed. Our results show a consistency across different data releases, and therefore, the anomalous behavior deserves a careful consideration regarding its origin and ramifications. Disregarding the unlikely source of the anomaly being instrumental systematics, the origin of the anomaly may be genuinely astrophysical -- perhaps due to a yet unresolved foreground, or truly primordial in nature. Given the nature of the topological descriptors, that potentially encodes information of all orders, non-Gaussianities, of either primordial or late-type nature, may be potential candidates. Alternate possibilities include the Universe admitting a non-trivial global topology, including effects induced by large-scale topological defects.