A Hamiltonian Engine for Radiotherapy Optimization.

We apply a new hardware and software platform called the Hamiltonian Engine for Radiotherapy Optimization (HERO) to the problem of Intensity-Modulated Radiation Therapy (IMRT) treatment planning. HERO solves large general-form binary optimization problems by decomposing them into sub-problems and approximating them using a quadratic pseudo-boolean function. Optimizing the resulting function becomes a quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) problem, which has been widely studied and has numerous applications in various fields. A Quantum Annealer (QA) approach has been previously investigated to solve QUBO problems, including IMRT optimization. However, the QA can only accommodate a small number of variables and requires several hours to obtain optimized plans. HERO acts as an optimizer for QUBO problems, which not only addresses these shortcomings but also relies solely on conventional hardware design while operating at room temperature. We evaluate HERO on seven prostate IMRT cases with clinical objectives, each using approximately 6000 beamlets. Our method was compared to the commercial treatment planning software, Eclipse, for both time-to-solution and plan quality. HERO solves most cases in about 30 seconds, with significantly lower objective function scores than Eclipse. The results indicate that HERO is promising for radiation therapy optimization problems. Additionally, HERO has the potential to be applied to Volumetric-Modulated Arc Therapy (VMAT) and other complex types of treatment planning.

Optical and electrical trade-offs of rib-to-contact distance in depletion-type ring modulators.

We present a study on electrical and optical trade-offs of the doping map in a ring modulator. Here, we investigate the effects of the high-doped region distance to edge of the waveguide sidewall. Four groups of ring modulators with different rib-to-contact distances are fabricated and measured where the key parameters such as extinction ratio, insertion loss, transmission penalty, and bandwidth are compared quantitatively. Small-signal responses for the selected ring modulators are simulated where results are in agreement with measurement results. We show that, at 4dB extinction ratio, decreasing the high-doped region distance to rib from 800nm to 350nm will increase the bandwidth by 3.8 ×. However, we observed 8.4dB increase the insertion loss. We also show that the high-doped region location affects the trade-off between bandwidth and frequency response magnitude at low frequencies. At 350nm, this trade off is 2.5 × and 3.8× more efficient compared to 550nm and 800nm, respectively.

Ring modulator small-signal response analysis based on pole-zero representation.

We present a closed-form expression for the small-signal response of a depletion-mode ring modulator and verify it by measurement results. Both electrical and optical behavior of micro-ring modulator as well as the loss variation due to the index modulation is considered in the derivation. This expression suggests that a ring modulator is a third-order system with one real pole, one zero and a pair of complex-conjugate poles. The exact positions of the poles/zero are given and shown to be dependent upon parameters such as electrical bandwidth, coupling condition, optical loss, and sign/value of laser detunings. We show that the location of zero is different for positive and negative detuning, and therefore, the ring modulator frequency response is asymmetric. We use the gain-bandwidth product as a figure of merit and calculate it for various pole/zero locations. We show that gain-bandwidth for the over-coupled ring modulator is superior compared to other coupling conditions. Also, we show that the gain-bandwidth product can be increased to a limit by increasing the electrical bandwidth.

PAM-N signaling by coupling modulation in a ring resonator.

A new method for an all-optical PAM modulation is presented. The method relies on coupling modulation of a ring resonator with an RF length much shorter than the previously proposed segmented MZI. The PAM modulator is optimized in terms of linearity both for the reverse and forward-biased cases. This modulator can operate for long haul communication with data rate only limited by the bandwidth of the MZI.

Real-time face detection and lip feature extraction using field-programmable gate arrays.

This paper proposes a new technique for face detection and lip feature extraction. A real-time field-programmable gate array (FPGA) implementation of the two proposed techniques is also presented. Face detection is based on a naive Bayes classifier that classifies an edge-extracted representation of an image. Using edge representation significantly reduces the model's size to only 5184 B, which is 2417 times smaller than a comparable statistical modeling technique, while achieving an 86.6% correct detection rate under various lighting conditions. Lip feature extraction uses the contrast around the lip contour to extract the height and width of the mouth, metrics that are useful for speech filtering. The proposed FPGA system occupies only 15050 logic cells, or about six times less than a current comparable FPGA face detection system.