Today’s generative models can synthesize magnetic resonance images (MRIs) of the brain at specific ages. However, such models can neither map the aging process longitudinally within subjects, nor accommodate its variability across subjects. Such approaches also cannot predict anatomic features of aging in ways that can be validated retrospectively or trusted prospectively. We introduce a three-dimensional hybrid ControlNet + diffusion model that uses the baseline T1-weighted MRIs of healthy adults to predict individual neuroanatomic aging trajectories, as reflected by follow-up MRIs. The approach captures individual anatomical changes with an average predicted voxelwise intensity error of 15% and structural similarity index of 93%. Unlike methods relying on qualitative validation, our approach quantifies the fidelity of prospective MRI synthesis using FreeSurfer volumetrics. Because brain atrophy reflects risk for Alzheimer’s disease (AD), our model’s ability to generate individual-specific prospective MRIs suggests its clinical potential to assist AD risk estimation.

With the advent of hundreds of cores on a chip to accelerate applications, the operating system (OS) needs to exploit the existing parallelism provided by the underlying hardware resources to determine the right amount of processes to be mapped on the multi-core systems. However, the existing OS is not scalable and is oblivious to applications. We address these issues by adopting a multi-layer network representation of the dynamic application-to-OS-to-architecture dependencies, namely the NetworkedOS. We adopt a compile-time analysis and construct a network representing the dependencies between dynamic instructions translated from the applications and the kernel and services. We propose an overlapping partitioning scheme to detect the clusters or processes that can potentially run in parallel to be mapped onto cores while reducing the number of messages transferred. At run time, processes are mapped onto the multi-core systems, taking into consideration the process affinity. Our experimental results indicate that NetworkedOS achieves performance improvement as high as 7.11x compared to Linux running on a 128-core system and 2.01x to Barrelfish running on a 64-core system.

Reconstructing natural images from fMRI recordings is a challenging task of great importance in neuroscience. The current architectures are bottlenecked because they fail to effectively capture the hierarchical processing of visual stimuli that takes place in the human brain. Motivated by that fact, we introduce a novel neural network architecture for the problem of neural decoding. Our architecture uses Hierarchical Variational Autoencoders (HVAEs) to learn meaningful representations of natural images and leverages their latent space hierarchy to learn voxel-to-image mappings. By mapping the early stages of the visual pathway to the first set of latent variables and the higher visual cortex areas to the deeper layers in the latent hierarchy, we are able to construct a latent variable neural decoding model that replicates the hierarchical visual information processing. Our model achieves better reconstructions compared to the state of the art and our ablation study indicates that the hierarchical structure of the latent space is responsible for that performance.