Cardiovascular imaging analysis is a useful tool for the diagnosis, treatment and monitoring of cardiovascular diseases. Imaging techniques allow non-invasive quantitative assessment of cardiac function, providing morphological, functional and dynamic information. Recent technological advances in ultrasound have made it possible to improve the quality of patient treatment, thanks to the use of modern image processing and analysis techniques. However, the acquisition of these dynamic three-dimensional (3D) images leads to the production of large volumes of data to process, from which cardiac structures must be extracted and analyzed during the cardiac cycle. Extraction, three-dimensional visualization, and qualification tools are currently used within the clinical routine, but unfortunately require significant interaction with the physician. These elements justify the development of new efficient and robust algorithms for structure extraction and cardiac motion estimation from three-dimensional images. As a result, making available to clinicians new means to accurately assess cardiac anatomy and function from three-dimensional images represents a definite advance in the investigation of a complete description of the heart from a single examination. The aim of this article is to show what advances have been made in 3D cardiac imaging by ultrasound and additionally to observe which areas have been studied under this imaging modality.

This study uses the opening of the new Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) in stages between 2010 and 2012 in Singapore as the exogenous event to empirically test the impact of the new Circle Line (CL) on housing wealth. Applying a "differences-in-differences" approach to the non-landed private housing transaction data covering the period from 2009 to 2013, we find that the average housing prices increase by 1.6% in the post-opening of the CL. We find significant capitalization of the new CL into housing prices, especially households living within a 400-meter radius (the treatment zone) from the closest MRT stations on the CL. The treatment effects that are measured by the "marginal willingness to pay" for houses located within the treatment zone is 13.2% relative to houses located outside the treatment zone. The new CL opening creates an estimated S$1.23 billion housing wealth effects for households living in close proximity to the CL MRT stations. However, we do not find significant "anticipative" effects on house prices in the six-month window prior to the opening of CL. The strongest treatment effect is found after the opening of the phase 1 of CL, and the treatment intensity declines in phases 2 and 3 of the CL opening.

Japan’s investment in the domestic construction industry has fallen to less than half its peak in 1992. Given the country’s declining population, Japanese construction companies must go global to remain profitable. To what extent the Japanese government and Japanese companies can contribute to meeting the growing infrastructure needs in the region is unclear as Japanese companies have long been operating primarily in Japan. The Japanese government has in recent years passed a series of new laws that encourage private sector participation in financing, building and operating public infrastructure. Through involvement in such public projects, Japanese companies have developed the skills and technologies to build a variety of infrastructures that are resilient to natural disasters and adaptable to various geographical conditions and social and economic development. But the major challenge for Japanese companies is to transform their business model drastically from one that relies on the domestic market to one that contributes to the social and economic development of third countries.

It has become commonplace to describe publicly provided infrastructure as being in a sorry state and to advance public-private partnership as a possible remedy. This essay adopts a skeptical but not a cynical posture toward those claims. The paper starts by reviewing the comparative properties of markets and politics within a theory of budgeting where the options are construction and maintenance. This analytical point of departure explains how incongruities between political and market action can favor construction over maintenance. In short, political entities can engage in an implicit form of public debt by reducing maintenance spending to support other budgetary items. This implicit form of public debt does not manifest in higher interest rates but rather manifests in crumbling bridges and other infrastructure due to the transfer of maintenance into other budgetary activities.

Space is a product of society. Driven by industrialization, urbanization, informatization and government policies, China’s rural space is undergoing drastic reconstruction. As one of the core contents of international rural geography research, rural space research are multi-disciplinary, multi perspective, multi-dimensional and multi-method, forming a rich research field. In order to comprehensively grasp the progress of rural space research abroad, this study reviewed international rural space research literature in recent 40 years. The study found that foreign scholars described the connotation of rural space from the aspects of material, imagination and practice, emphasize the importance of daily life practice. It introduced living space to construct a more systematic research framework of rural space by establishing a “three-fold model of rural space”. With regard to the theoretical perspective, international research on rural space has experienced three stages: functionalism, political economics and social constructivism. In the evolution of time, it has realized the transformation from productivism to post-productivism; in the spatial dimension, it realizes the multiple superposition of settlement space, economic space, social space and cultural space. As a whole, international research on rural space has realized the transformation from material level to social representation, from objective space to subjective space, and from static one-dimensional space to dynamic multi-dimensional space, which enlightens us on the importance of interdisciplinary research and “social cultural” research on rural space. The construction of rural space in China needs to pay attention to the subject status of farmers and multifunction of rural space, respect the role of locality and difference of various places, and recover the function of production of meaning of rural space.

Infrastructure investment has long been held as an accelerator or a driver of the economy. Internationally, the UK ranks poorly with the performance of infrastructure and ranks in the lower percentile for both infrastructure investment and GDP growth rate amongst comparative nations. Faced with the uncertainty of Brexit and the likely negative economic impact this will bring, infrastructure investment may be used to strengthen the UK economy. This study aims to examine how infrastructure funding impacts economic growth and how best the UK can maximize this potential by building on existing work.
The research method is based on interviews carried out with respondents involved in infrastructure operating across various sectors. The findings show that investment in infrastructure is vital in the UK as it stimulates economic growth through employment creation due to factor productivity. However, it is critical for investment to be directed to regional opportunity areas with the potential to unlock economic growth and maximize returns whilst stimulating further growth to benefit other regions. There is also a need for policy consistency and to review UK infrastructure policy to streamline the process and to reduce cost and time overrun, with Brexit likely to impact negatively on infrastructure investment.