Zhou Lan

Ruixi Zheng, Wei Zhang, Yijie Li et al.

Diffusion MRI (dMRI) tractography is currently the only method for in vivo mapping of the brain's white matter (WM) connections. Tractometry is an advanced tractography analysis technique for along-tract profiling to investigate the morphology and microstructural properties along the fiber tracts. Tractometry has become an essential tool for studying local along-tract differences between different populations (e.g., health vs disease). In this study, we propose a novel atlas-guided fine-scale tractometry method, namely AGFS-Tractometry, that leverages tract spatial information and permutation testing to enhance the along-tract statistical analysis between populations. There are two major contributions in AGFS-Tractometry. First, we create a novel atlas-guided tract profiling template that enables consistent, fine-scale, along-tract parcellation of subject-specific fiber tracts. Second, we propose a novel nonparametric permutation testing group comparison method to enable simultaneous analysis across all along-tract parcels while correcting for multiple comparisons. We perform experimental evaluations on synthetic datasets with known group differences and in vivo real data. We compare AGFS-Tractometry with two state-of-the-art tractometry methods, including Automated Fiber-tract Quantification (AFQ) and BUndle ANalytics (BUAN). Our results show that the proposed AGFS-Tractometry obtains enhanced sensitivity and specificity in detecting local WM differences. In the real data analysis experiments, AGFS-Tractometry can identify more regions with significant differences, which are anatomically consistent with the existing literature. Overall, these demonstrate the ability of AGFS-Tractometry to detect subtle or spatially localized WM group-level differences. The created tract profiling template and related code are available at: https://github.com/ZhengRuixi/AGFS-Tractometry.git.

Zhou Lan, Ben Liu, Yi Feng et al.

Daily electricity consumption forecasting is a classical problem. Existing forecasting algorithms tend to have decreased accuracy on special dates like holidays. This study decomposes the daily electricity consumption series into three components: trend, seasonal, and residual, and constructs a two-stage prediction method using piecewise linear regression as a filter and Dilated Causal CNN as a predictor. The specific steps involve setting breakpoints on the time axis and fitting the piecewise linear regression model with one-hot encoded information such as month, weekday, and holidays. For the challenging prediction of the Spring Festival, distance is introduced as a variable using a third-degree polynomial form in the model. The residual sequence obtained in the previous step is modeled using Dilated Causal CNN, and the final prediction of daily electricity consumption is the sum of the two-stage predictions. Experimental results demonstrate that this method achieves higher accuracy compared to existing approaches.