Spatial Correlation Analysis on the Resource Allocation Efficiency of Regional Higher Education in China

This analysis may promote the regional development of higher education, resolve problems associated with inadequate resources, and improve efficiency of resource allocation. In this study, we examined the efficiency of resource allocation for higher education in 31 Chinese provinces using data envelopment analysis (DEA); spatial correlation was used concurrently for analytical purposes. Our aims through this study are to promote the optimal allocation of resources and healthy development of higher education

A systematic review on sustainability assessment of internal combustion engines

Internal combustion engines (ICEs) have served as the primary powertrain for mobile sources since the 1890s and also recognized as significant contributors to CO2 emissions in the transportation sector. In order to achieve "carbon neutrality" for transportation sectors, ICE vehicles (ICEVs) are facing substantial challenges in meeting CO2 regulations and intense competition from battery electric vehicles and fuel cell vehicles. Consequently, new technologies of ICEs are continually emerging to enhance competitiveness in reducing environmental impacts. However, the limited studies on the life cycle assessment (LCA) of ICEs make it difficult to evaluate the actual contributions of the emerging technologies from a life cycle perspective. Conducting a systematic review of ICEs LCA studies could identify weaknesses and gaps in these studies for new scenarios. Therefore, this article presents the first systematic review of the LCA of ICEs to provide an overview of the current state of knowledge. A total of 87 life cycle assessment studies between 2017 and 2023 using the Scopus database were identified after searching for the keywords "Sustainability assessment" OR "Life cycle assessment" AND "Internal combustion engine*" OR "ICE*" and carefully screening, and then classified and analyzed by six aspects including sustainability indicators, life cycle phases, life cycle inventories, ICE technologies (including alternative fuels), types of mobile sources and powertrain systems. It is concluded that there are quite limited studies solely focusing on LCA of ICEs, and the LCA assessment lacks consideration of: 1. environmental pollution, human health and socio-economic aspects, 2. fuel production process and maintenance & repair phase, 3. small and developing countries, 4. the emerging ICE technologies and zero carbon/carbon-neutral fuels, 5. large and high-power mobile sources and heavy-duty hybrid technologies

Bundle-specific Tractogram Distribution Estimation Using Higher-order Streamline Differential Equation

Tractography traces the peak directions extracted from fiber orientation distribution (FOD) suffering from ambiguous spatial correspondences between diffusion directions and fiber geometry, which is prone to producing erroneous tracks while missing true positive connections. The peaks-based tractography methods 'locally' reconstructed streamlines in 'single to single' manner, thus lacking of global information about the trend of the whole fiber bundle. In this work, we propose a novel tractography method based on a bundle-specific tractogram distribution function by using a higher-order streamline differential equation, which reconstructs the streamline bundles in 'cluster to cluster' manner. A unified framework for any higher-order streamline differential equation is presented to describe the fiber bundles with disjoint streamlines defined based on the diffusion tensor vector field. At the global level, the tractography process is simplified as the estimation of bundle-specific tractogram distribution (BTD) coefficients by minimizing the energy optimization model, and is used to characterize the relations between BTD and diffusion tensor vector under the prior guidance by introducing the tractogram bundle information to provide anatomic priors. Experiments are performed on simulated Hough, Sine, Circle data, ISMRM 2015 Tractography Challenge data, FiberCup data, and in vivo data from the Human Connectome Project (HCP) data for qualitative and quantitative evaluation. The results demonstrate that our approach can reconstruct the complex global fiber bundles directly. BTD reduces the error deviation and accumulation at the local level and shows better results in reconstructing long-range, twisting, and large fanning tracts