Periapical radiolucencies, which can be detected on panoramic radiographs, are one of the most common radiographic findings in dentistry and have a differential diagnosis including infections, granuloma, cysts and tumors. In this study, we seek to investigate the ability with which 24 oral and maxillofacial (OMF) surgeons assess the presence of periapical lucencies on panoramic radiographs, and we compare these findings to the performance of a predictive deep learning algorithm that we have developed using a curated data set of 2902 de-identified panoramic radiographs. The mean diagnostic positive predictive value (PPV) of OMF surgeons based on their assessment of panoramic radiographic images was 0.69 (±0.13), indicating that dentists on average falsely diagnose 31% of cases as radiolucencies. However, the mean diagnostic true positive rate (TPR) was 0.51 (±0.14), indicating that on average 49% of all radiolucencies were missed. We demonstrate that the deep learning algorithm achieves a better performance than 14 of 24 OMF surgeons within the cohort, exhibiting an average precision of 0.60 (±0.04), and an F₁ score of 0.58 (±0.04) corresponding to a PPV of 0.67 (±0.05) and TPR of 0.51 (±0.05). The algorithm, trained on limited data and evaluated on clinically validated ground truth, has potential to assist OMF surgeons in detecting periapical lucencies on panoramic radiographs.

Standard methods for including electromagnetic interactions in lattice quantum chromodynamics calculations result in power-law finite-volume corrections to physical quantities. Removing these by extrapolation requires costly computations at multiple volumes. We introduce a photon mass to alternatively regulate the infrared, and rely on effective field theory to remove its unphysical effects. Electromagnetic modifications to the hadron spectrum are reliably estimated with a precision and cost comparable to conventional approaches that utilize multiple larger volumes. A significant overall cost advantage emerges when accounting for ensemble generation. The proposed method may benefit lattice calculations involving multiple charged hadrons, as well as quantum many-body computations with long-range Coulomb interactions.

We perform lattice Monte Carlo simulations for up to 66 unitary fermions in a finite box using a highly improved lattice action for nonrelativistic spin-$\frac{1}{2}$ fermions. We obtain a value of $0.{366}_{-0.011}^{+0.016}$ for the Bertsch parameter, defined as the energy of the unitary Fermi gas measured in units of the free gas energy in the thermodynamic limit. In addition, for up to four unitary fermions, we compute the spectrum of the lattice theory by exact diagonalization of the transfer matrix projected onto irreducible representations of the octahedral group for small to moderate size lattices, providing an independent check of our few-body simulation results. We compare our exact numerical and simulation results for the spectrum to benchmark studies of other research groups as well as perform an extended analysis of our lattice action improvement scheme, including an analysis of the errors associated with higher partial waves and finite temporal discretization.

We present a method for simulating relativistic and nonrelativistic scalar field theories at finite density, with matter transforming in the fundamental representation of the global symmetry group $O(N)$. The method avoids the problem of complex probability weights which is present in conventional path integral Monte Carlo algorithms. To verify our approach, we simulate the free and interacting relativistic $U(1)\simeq O(2)$ theory in $2+1$ dimensions. We compute the two-point correlation function and charge density as a function of chemical potential in the free theory. At weak $|\varphi {|}^4$ coupling and zero temperature we map the $m^2\mathrm{\text{−}}\mu$ phase diagram and compare our numerical results with perturbative calculations. Finally, we compute properties of the $T\mathrm{\text{−}}\mu$ phase diagram in the vicinity of the phase transition and at bare self-couplings large compared to the temperature and chemical potential.