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In this cross-sectional study of 1475 Chinese university students, we explored associated factors of attitude and willingness of biodiversity conservation, analyzed the hypothesized mediation by social support in the association between attitude and willingness of biodiversity conservation. Multivariate logistic regression model revealed that major and social support were prominently related to both attitude and willingness of biodiversity conservation. Besides, path model identified a statistically significant mediation by social support, sex, race, and family residence presented noticeable effect modification on the mediation of social support. These major findings suggest that intervention measures which aiming at enhancing social support could be considered for elevating attitude and willingness of biodiversity conservation among Chinese university students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to realize the image fusion and improve the quality of the integration, with the aid of dual modality contrast agent (DMCA), a novel fusion method between ultrasound imaging (US) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) was put forward in this paper. Due to US's strong speckle noise, it was an enormous challenge to fuse US with any other modality images. Under the circumstances, DMCA was used in both US and MRI to strengthen the most important information region of interest. Then, because of Rayleigh distribution of US, a self-adaptive weighted non-negative matrix factorization (SWNMF) scheme is constructed to complete the fusion process. In view of the above-mentioned method, the multiple group comparison tests indicated that US-MRI fusion may be a remarkable method for gaining high-quality fusion image. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quantum mutual information and concurrence are two important measures of quantum correlations, and their similar behavior for a bipartite pure state calls for inspecting whether such a behavior remains for a multipartite pure state. The dynamical correlation of quantum mutual information and tripartite entanglement is analytically and numerically studied for initial states, total boson numbers and coupling parameters in a symmetric trimer molecule, where the entanglement is measured in terms of concurrence. A correlation parameter is introduced to describe the correlation between mutual information and concurrence. It is shown that both quantities are positively or anti-correlated in irregular manner. However, they exhibit completely positive correlation for suitable states, with their explicit expressions being presented for arbitrary model parameters. The dynamical correlation between bipartite and tripartite entanglement is discussed as well. Those shed new light on the understanding of quantum correlations of vibrational states in polyatomic molecules. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: As a dual-modality contrast agent, magnetic microbubbles (MMBs) can not only improve contrast of ultrasound (US) image, but can also serve as a contrast agent of magnetic resonance image (MRI). With the help of MMBs, a new registration method between US image and MRI is presented.Methods: In this method, MMBs were used in both ultrasound and magnetic resonance imaging process to enhance the most important information of interest. In order to reduce the influence of the speckle noise to registration, semi-automatic segmentations of US image and MRI were carried out by using active contour model. After that, a robust optical flow model between US image segmentation (floating image) and MRI segmentation (reference image) was built, and the vector flow field was estimated by using the Coarse-to-fine Gaussian pyramid and graduated non-convexity (GNC) schemes.Results: Qualitative and quantitative analyses of multiple group comparison experiments showed that registration results using all methods tested in this paper without MMBs were unsatisfactory. On the contrary, the proposed method combined with MMBs led to the best registration results.Conclusion: The proposed algorithm combined with MMBs contends with larger deformation and performs well not only for local deformation but also for global deformation. The comparison experiments also demonstrated that ultrasound-MRI registration using the above-mentioned method might be a promising method for obtaining more accurate image information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]