Search results for: medical services

Authors: Xiao Zhou, Kazuhiro Imai, Xiaoxuan Liu

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Badminton is one type of racket sports that requires repetitive overhead motion, with the shoulder in abduction/external rotation and requires players to perform jumps, lunges, and quick directional changes. These characteristics could be stressful for body regions that may cause badminton injuries. Regarding racket players including badminton players, there have not been any studies that have utilized medical check-up to evaluate epidemiology and mechanism of injuries. In addition, epidemiology of badminton injury in school age badminton players is unknown. The first purpose of this study was to investigate the badminton injuries, physical fitness parameters, and intensity of shoulder pain using medical check-up so that the mechanisms of shoulder injuries might be revealed. The second purpose of this study was to survey the distribution of badminton injuries in elementary school age players so that injury prevention can be implemented as early as possible. The results of this study revealed that shoulder pain occurred in all players, and present shoulder pain players had smaller weight, greater shoulder external rotation (ER) gain, significantly thinner circumference of upper limbs and greater trunk extension. Identifying players with specific of these factors may enhance the prevention of badminton injury. This study also shows that there are high incidences of knee, ankle, plantar, and shoulder injury or pain in elementary school age badminton players. Injury prevention program might be implemented for elementary school age players.

Keywords: Badminton injury, epidemiology, medical check-up, school age players.

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Authors: Chutarat Boontho

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The purposes of this study were as follows to evaluate the economic value of Phu Kradueng National Park by the travel cost method (TCM) and the contingent valuation method (CVM) and to estimate the demand for traveling and the willingness to pay. The data for this study were collected by conducting two large scale surveys on users and non-users. A total of 1,016 users and 1,034 non-users were interviewed. The data were analyzed using multiple linear regression analysis, logistic regression model and the consumer surplus (CS) was the integral of demand function for trips. The survey found, were as follows: 1)Using the travel cost method which provides an estimate of direct benefits to park users, we found that visitors- total willingness to pay per visit was 2,284.57 bath, of which 958.29 bath was travel cost, 1,129.82 bath was expenditure for accommodation, food, and services, and 166.66 bath was consumer surplus or the visitors -net gain or satisfaction from the visit (the integral of demand function for trips). 2) Thai visitors to Phu Kradueng National Park were further willing to pay an average of 646.84 bath per head per year to ensure the continued existence of Phu Kradueng National Park and to preserve their option to use it in the future. 3) Thai non-visitors, on the other hand, are willing to pay an average of 212.61 bath per head per year for the option and existence value provided by the Park. 4) The total economic value of Phu Kradueng National Park to Thai visitors and non-visitors taken together stands today at 9,249.55 million bath per year. 5) The users- average willingness to pay for access to Phu Kradueng National Park rises from 40 bath to 84.66 bath per head per trip for improved services such as road improvement, increased cleanliness, and upgraded information. This paper was needed to investigate of the potential market demand for bio prospecting in Phu Kradueng national Park and to investigate how a larger share of the economic benefits of tourism could be distributed income to the local residents.

Keywords: Contingent Valuation Method, Travel Cost Method, Consumer surplus.

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Authors: Tahvilian R., Siahi Shadbad MR., Hamishehkar H., Aghababa Gharehbagh V.

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Nowadays pharmaceutical care departments located in hospitals are amongst the important pillars of the healthcare system. The aim of this study was to evaluate quality of hospital drugstores affiliated with Kermanshah University of Medical Sciences. In this cross-sectional study a validated questionnaire was used. The questionnaire was filled in by the one of the researchers in all seventeen hospital drugstores located in the teaching and nonteaching hospitals affiliated with Kermanshah University of Medical Sciences. The results shows that in observed hospitals,24% of pharmacy environments, 25% of pharmacy store and storage conditions, 49% of storage procedure, 25% of ordering drugs and supplies, 73% of receiving supplies (proper procedure are fallowed for receiving supplies), 35% of receiving supplies (prompt action taken if deterioration of drugs received is suspected), 23.35% of drugs delivery to patients and finally 0% of stock cards are used for proper inventory control have full compliance with standards.

Keywords: Hospital pharmacy standards, Kermanshah, pharmacy management

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Authors: E. Fosch-Villaronga

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This paper pioneers Care Robot Impact Assessment (CRIA), a methodology used to identify, analyze, mitigate and eliminate the risks posed by the insertion of non-medical personal care robots (PCR) in medical care facilities. Its precedent instruments [Privacy and Surveillance Impact Assessment (PIA and SIA)] fall behind in coping with robots. Indeed, personal care robots change dramatically how care is delivered. The paper presents a specific risk-sector methodology, identifies which robots are under its scope and presents some of the challenges introduced by these robots.

Keywords: Ethics, Impact Assessment, Law, Personal Care Robots.

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Authors: S. Kurien, S. Satpathy, S. K. Gupta, S. K. Arya, D. K. Sharma

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Advances in the use of health care technology have resulted in increased adverse events (AEs) related to the use of medical devices. The study focused on the existing reporting systems. This study was conducted in a tertiary care public sector hospital. Devices included Syringe infusion pumps, Cardiac monitors, Pulse oximeters, Ventilators and Defibrillators. A total of 211 respondents were recruited. Interviews were held with 30 key informants. Medical records were scrutinized. Relevant statistical tests were used. Resident doctors reported maximum frequency of AEs, followed by nurses; and least by consultants. A significant association was found between the cadre of health care personnel and awareness that the patients and bystanders have a risk of sustaining AE. Awareness regarding reporting of AEs was low, and it was generally done verbally. Other critical findings are discussed in the light of the barriers to reporting, reasons for non-compliance, recording system, and so on.

Keywords: Adverse events, health care technology, public sector hospital, reporting systems.

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Authors: James A. Nelson

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The history of technology and banking is examined as it relates to risk and technological determinism. It is proposed that the services that banks offer are determined by technology and that banks must adopt new technologies to be competitive. The adoption of technologies paradoxically forces the adoption of other new technologies to protect the bank from the increased risk of technology. This cycle will lead to bank examiners and regulators to focus on human behavior, not on the ever changing technology.

Keywords: Banking, information security, risk, technologicaldeterminism.

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Authors: Fei Peng, Jun Yuan, Chen Fan, Fan Jiang, Qian Sun, Yudi Liu

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Although Earth Station in Motion (ESIM) services are widely used and there is a huge market demand around the world, International Telecommunication Union (ITU) does not have unified conclusion for the use of ESIM yet. ESIM are Mobile Satellite Services (MSS) due to its mobile-based attributes, while multiple administrations want to use ESIM in Fixed Satellite Service (FSS). However, Radio Regulations (RR) have strict distinction between MSS and FSS. In this case, ITU has been very controversial because this kind of application will violate the RR Article and the conflict will bring risks to the global deployment. Thus, this paper illustrates the development of rules, regulations, standards concerning ESIM and the radio spectrum usage of ESIM in different regions around the world. Firstly, the basic rules, standard and definition of ITU’s Radiocommunication Sector (ITU-R) is introduced. Secondly, the World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC) agenda item on radio spectrum allocation for ESIM, e.g. in C/Ku/Ka band, is introduced and multi-view on the radio spectrum allocation is elaborated, especially on 19.7-20.2 GHz & 29.5-30.0 GHz. Then, some ITU-R Recommendations and Reports are analyzed on the specific technique to enable these ESIM to communicate with Geostationary Earth Orbit Satellite (GSO) space stations in the FSS without causing interference at levels in excess of that caused by conventional FSS earth stations. Meanwhile, the opposite opinion on not allocating EISM service in FSS frequency band is also elaborated. Finally, based on the ESIM’s future application, the ITU-R standards development trend is forecasted. In conclusion, using radio spectrum resource in an equitable, rational and efficient manner is the basic guideline of ITU. Although it is not a good approach to obstruct the revise of RR when there is a large demand for radio spectrum resource in satellite industry, still the propulsion and global demand of the whole industry may face difficulties on the unclear application in modify rules of RR.

Keywords: Earth Station in motion, ITU standards, radio regulations, radio spectrum, satellite communication.

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Authors: Mohammad Al Rawajbeh, Ahmad Haboush

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The primary aim of the e-government applications is the fast citizen service and the accomplishment of governmental functions. This paper discusses the knowledge management for egovernment development in the needs and role. The paper focused on analyzing the advantages of using knowledge management by using the existing IT technologies to maximize the government functions efficiency. The proposed new approach of providing government services is based on using Knowledge management as a part of e-government system.

Keywords: E-government, knowledge management, e-service, etools, governmental functions.

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Authors: Erin Lynne Plettenberg, Jeremy Vickery

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In an access-control situation, the role of a user determines whether a data request is appropriate. This paper combines vetted web mining and logic modeling to build a lightweight system for determining the role of a health care provider based only on their prior authorized requests. The model identifies provider roles with 100% recall from very little data. This shows the value of vetted web mining in AI systems, and suggests the impact of the ICD classification on medical practice.

Keywords: Ontology, logic modeling, electronic medical records, information extraction, vetted web mining.

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Authors: I. Derek Kaka’an, P. Smolianov, D. Koh Choon Lian, S. Dion, C. Schoen, J. Norberg

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This study was designed to examine mass participation and elite football performance in Nigeria with reference to advance international football management practices. Over 200 sources of literature on sport delivery systems were analyzed to construct a globally applicable model of elite football integrated with mass participation, comprising of the following three levels: macro- (socio-economic, cultural, legislative, and organizational), meso- (infrastructures, personnel, and services enabling sport programs) and micro-level (operations, processes, and methodologies for development of individual athletes). The model has received scholarly validation and showed to be a framework for program analysis that is not culturally bound. The Smolianov and Zakus model has been employed for further understanding of sport systems such as US soccer, US Rugby, swimming, tennis, and volleyball as well as Russian and Dutch swimming. A questionnaire was developed using the above-mentioned model. Survey questions were validated by 12 experts including academicians, executives from sport governing bodies, football coaches, and administrators. To identify best practices and determine areas for improvement of football in Nigeria, 120 coaches completed the questionnaire. Useful exemplars and possible improvements were further identified through semi-structured discussions with 10 Nigerian football administrators and experts. Finally, content analysis of Nigeria Football Federation’s website and organizational documentation was conducted. This paper focuses on the meso-level of Nigerian football delivery, particularly infrastructures, personnel, and services enabling sport programs. This includes training centers, competition systems, and intellectual services. Results identified remarkable achievements coupled with great potential to further develop football in different types of public and private organizations in Nigeria. These include: assimilating football competitions with other cultural and educational activities, providing favorable conditions for employees of all possible organizations to partake and help in managing football programs and events, providing football coaching integrated with counseling for prevention of antisocial conduct, and improving cooperation between football programs and organizations for peace-making and advancement of international relations, tourism, and socio-economic development. Accurate reporting of the sports programs from the media should be encouraged through staff training for better awareness of various events. The systematic integration of these meso-level practices into the balanced development of mass and high-performance football will contribute to international sport success as well as national health, education, and social harmony.

Keywords: Football, high performance, mass participation, Nigeria, sport development.

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Authors: Seung You Na, Joo Hyun Jung, Jin Young Kim, Mohammad AhangarKiasari

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There are various kinds of medical equipment which requires relatively accurate positional adjustments for successful treatment. However, patients tend to move without notice during a certain span of operations. Therefore, it is common practice that accompanying operators adjust the focus of the equipment. In this paper, tracking controllers for medical equipment are suggested to replace the operators. The tracking controllers use AHRS sensor information to recognize the movements of patients. Sensor fusion is applied to reducing the error magnitudes through linear Kalman filters. The image processing of optical markers is included to adjust the accumulation errors of gyroscope sensor data especially for yaw angles. The tracking controller reduces the positional errors between the current focus of a device and the target position on the body of a patient. Since the sensing frequencies of AHRS sensors are very high compared to the physical movements, the control performance is satisfactory. The typical applications are, for example, ESWT or rTMS, which have the error ranges of a few centimeters.

Keywords: AHRS, Sensor fusion, Tracking control, Position and posture.

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Authors: Aurelija Burinskienė, Dalė Dzemydienė, Arūnas Miliauskas

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This research aims at developing the approach for more effective freight delivery and transportation process management. The road congestions and the identification of causes are important, as well as the context information recognition and management. The measure of many parameters during the transportation period and proper control of driver work became the problem. The number of vehicles per time unit passing at a given time and point for drivers can be evaluated in some situations. The collection of data is mainly used to establish new trips. The flow of the data is more complex in urban areas. Herein, the movement of freight is reported in detail, including the information on street level. When traffic density is extremely high in congestion cases, and the traffic speed is incredibly low, data transmission reaches the peak. Different data sets are generated, which depend on the type of freight delivery network. There are three types of networks: long-distance delivery networks, last-mile delivery networks and mode-based delivery networks; the last one includes different modes, in particular, railways and other networks. When freight delivery is switched from one type of the above-stated network to another, more data could be included for reporting purposes and vice versa. In this case, a significant amount of these data is used for control operations, and the problem requires an integrated methodological approach. The paper presents an approach for providing e-services for drivers by including the assessment of the multi-component infrastructure needed for delivery of freights following the network type. The construction of such a methodology is required to evaluate data flow conditions and overloads, and to minimize the time gaps in data reporting. The results obtained show the possibilities of the proposing methodological approach to support the management and decision-making processes with functionality of incorporating networking specifics, by helping to minimize the overloads in data reporting.

Keywords: Transportation networks, freight delivery, data flow, monitoring, e-services.

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Authors: Mohamed Bendahmane, Brahim Elfalaki, Mohammed Benattou

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One of the major sources of learners' professional difficulties is their heterogeneity. Whether on cognitive, social, cultural or emotional level, learners being part of the same group have many differences. These differences do not allow to apply the same learning process at all learners. Thus, an optimal learning path for one, is not necessarily the same for the other. We present in this paper a model-oriented service to offer to each learner a personalized learning path to acquire the targeted skills.

Keywords: Service-oriented architecture, learning path, web service, personalization, trace analysis.

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Authors: Nisar Ahmed Memon, Anwar Majid Mirza, S.A.M. Gilani

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Segmentation is an important step in medical image analysis and classification for radiological evaluation or computer aided diagnosis. The CAD (Computer Aided Diagnosis ) of lung CT generally first segment the area of interest (lung) and then analyze the separately obtained area for nodule detection in order to diagnosis the disease. For normal lung, segmentation can be performed by making use of excellent contrast between air and surrounding tissues. However this approach fails when lung is affected by high density pathology. Dense pathologies are present in approximately a fifth of clinical scans, and for computer analysis such as detection and quantification of abnormal areas it is vital that the entire and perfectly lung part of the image is provided and no part, as present in the original image be eradicated. In this paper we have proposed a lung segmentation technique which accurately segment the lung parenchyma from lung CT Scan images. The algorithm was tested against the 25 datasets of different patients received from Ackron Univeristy, USA and AGA Khan Medical University, Karachi, Pakistan.

Keywords: Computer Aided Diagnosis, Medical ImageProcessing, Region Growing, Segmentation, Thresholding,

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Authors: J. P. Dubois, P. G. Jreije

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In this paper, a framework is presented trying to make the most secure web system out of the available generic and web security technology which can be used as a guideline for organizations building their web sites. The framework is designed to provide necessary security services, to address the known security threats, and to provide some cover to other security problems especially unknown threats. The requirements for the design are discussed which guided us to the design of secure web system. The designed security framework is then simulated and various quality of service (QoS) metrics are calculated to measure the performance of this system.

Keywords: Web Security, Internet Voting, Firewall, QoS, Latency, Utilization, Throughput.

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Authors: Mohammad Reza Naghavi, Farzad Alaeimoghadam, Hossein Ghafoori

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Artemisia species, which are medically beneficial, are widespread in temperate regions of both Northern and Southern hemispheres among which Iran is located. About 35 species of Artemisia are indigenous in Iran among them some are widespread in all or most provinces, yet some are restricted to some specific regions. In this review paper, initially, GC-Mass results of some experiments done in different provinces of Iran are mentioned among them some compounds are common among species, some others are mostly restricted to other species; after that, medical advantages based on some researches on species of this genus are reviewed; different qualities such as anti-leishmania, anti-bacteria, antiviral as well as anti-proliferative could be mentioned.

Keywords: Artemisia, GC-Mass analysis, medical advantage.

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Authors: P. Phenpun, S. Wareewan

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This qualitative study aimed to describe the opinions in relation to humanized care emerging from the volunteer activities of nursing students at Boromarajonani College of Nursing, Chonburi, Thailand. One hundred and twenty-seven second-year nursing students participated in this study. The volunteer activity model was composed of preparation, implementation, and evaluation through a learning log, in which students were encouraged to write their daily activities after completing practical training at the healthcare center. The preparation content included three main categories: service minded, analytical thinking, and client participation. The preparation process took over three days that accumulates up to 20 hours only. The implementation process was held over 10 days, but with a total of 70 hours only, with participants taking part in volunteer work activities at a healthcare center. A learning log was used for evaluation and data were analyzed using content analysis. The findings were as follows. With service minded, there were two subcategories that emerged from volunteer activities, which were service minded towards patients and within themselves. There were three categories under service minded towards patients, which were rapport, compassion, and empathy service behaviors, and there were four categories under service minded within themselves, which were self-esteem, self-value, management potential, and preparedness in providing good healthcare services. In line with analytical thinking, there were two components of analytical thinking, which were analytical skill for their works and analytical thinking for themselves. There were four subcategories under analytical thinking for their works, which were evidence based thinking, real situational thinking, cause analysis thinking, and systematic thinking, respectively. There were four subcategories under analytical thinking for themselves, which were comparative between themselves, towards their clients that leads to the changing of their service behaviors, open-minded thinking, modernized thinking, and verifying both verbal and non-verbal cues. Lastly, there were three categories under participation, which were mutual rapport relationship; reconsidering client’s needs services and providing useful health care information.

Keywords: Humanized care service, volunteer activity, nursing student, and learning log.

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Authors: Chiung-Hui Chen

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Traditional service channel is losing its edge due to emerging service technology. To establish interaction with the clients, the service industry is using effective mechanism to give clients direct access to services with emerging technologies. Thus, as service science receives attention, special and unique consumption pattern evolves; henceforth, leading to new market mechanism and influencing attitudes toward life and consumption patterns. The market demand for customized services is thus valued due to the emphasis of personal value, and is gradually changing the demand and supply relationship in the traditional industry. In respect of interior design service, in the process of traditional interior design, a designer converts to a concrete form the concept generated from the ideas and needs dictated by a user (client), by using his/her professional knowledge and drawing tool. The final product is generated through iterations of communication and modification, which is a very time-consuming process. Although this process has been accelerated with the help of computer graphics software today, repeated discussions and confirmations with users are still required to complete the task. In consideration of what is addressed above a space user’s life model is analyzed with visualization technique to create an interaction system modeled after interior design knowledge. The space user document intuitively personal life experience in a model requirement chart, allowing a researcher to analyze interrelation between analysis documents, identify the logic and the substance of data conversion. The repeated data which is documented are then transformed into design information for reuse and sharing. A professional interior designer may sort out the correlation among user’s preference, life pattern and design specification, thus deciding the critical design elements in the process of service design.

Keywords: Information Design, Life Model-Based, Aesthetic Computing, Communication.

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Authors: George Karkavitsas, Maria Rangoussi

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We present a genetic algorithm application to the problem of object registration (i.e., object detection, localization and recognition) in a class of medical images containing various types of blood cells. The genetic algorithm approach taken here is seen to be most appropriate for this type of image, due to the characteristics of the objects. Successful cell registration results on real life microscope images of blood cells show the potential of the proposed approach.

Keywords: Genetic algorithms, object registration, pattern recognition, blood cell microscope images.

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Authors: Juan L. Castro, Maria I. NavarroVictor Lopez, Eduardo M. Eisman, Jose M. Zurita

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This paper describes the Multilingual Virtual Simulated Patient framework. It has been created to train the social skills and testing the knowledge of primary health care medical students. The framework generates conversational agents which perform in serveral languages as virtual simulated patients that help to improve the communication and diagnosis skills of the students complementing their training process.

Keywords: Medical training, conversational agents, patient modeling.

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Authors: Jeroen S. de Bruin, Karin Schindler, Christian Schuh

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With increasingly more mobile health applications appearing due to the popularity of smartphones, the possibility arises that these data can be used to improve the medical diagnostic process, as well as the overall quality of healthcare, while at the same time lowering costs. However, as of yet there have been no reports of a successful combination of patient-generated data from smartphones with data from clinical routine. In this paper we describe how these two types of data can be combined in a secure way without modification to hospital information systems, and how they can together be used in a medical expert system for automatic nutritional classification and triage.

Keywords: Data integration, disease-related malnutrition, expert systems, mobile health.

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Authors: Imran Ihsan, Muhammad Abdul Qadir, Nadeem Iftikhar

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Mobile devices, which are progressively surrounded in our everyday life, have created a new paradigm where they interconnect, interact and collaborate with each other. This network can be used for flexible and secure coordinated sharing. On the other hand Grid computing provides dependable, consistent, pervasive, and inexpensive access to high-end computational capabilities. In this paper, efforts are made to map the concepts of Grid on Ad-Hoc networks because both exhibit similar kind of characteristics like Scalability, Dynamism and Heterogeneity. In this context we propose “Mobile Ad-Hoc Services Grid – MASGRID".

Keywords: Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks, Grid Computing, Resource Discovery, Routing

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Authors: Sevil Yıldız

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In this study, we will touch upon the legal arrangements issued in Turkey for prevention of condensation and for ensuring pluralism in the media. We will mention the legal arrangements concerning the regulatory and supervisory authority, namely the Radio and Television Supreme Council, for the visual and auditory media. In this context; the legal arrangements, which have been introduced by the Law No 6112 on the Establishment of Radio and Television Enterprises and Their Media Services in relation to the media ownership, will be reviewed through comparison with the Article 29 of the repealed Law No 3984.

Keywords: Media ownership, legal arrangements, the case for Turkey.

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Authors: Xiaoqing Wang, Fang Youyuan, Zheng Yanxing, Gu Tianyang, Zong Jianjian, Tong Jinrong

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Compared with traditional distributed environment, the net-centric environment brings on more demanding challenges for information sharing with the characteristics of ultra-large scale and strong distribution, dynamic, autonomy, heterogeneity, redundancy. This paper realizes an information sharing model and a series of core services, through which provides an open, flexible and scalable information sharing platform.

Keywords: Net-centric environment, Information sharing, Metadata registry and catalog, Cross-domain data access control.

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Authors: Zeynep Şahin, Züleyha Yılmaz, Fikret Çankaya

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In today's business world, in which it is difficult to survive, the economic life of products, services or knowledge is considerably reduced. Competitors produce similar products or extra-featured ones instantly. In this environment, the contribution of companies to the social and economic environment is a preferred criterion by consumers alongside products or services. Therefore, consumers need to obtain more detailed information about companies. Besides, this drastic change in the market encourages companies to become sustainable. Sustainable business means the company puts consumed products back. Corporate sustainability, corresponds to sustainability at the level of the company, and gives equal importance to company growth and profitability together with environmental and social issues. The BIST Sustainability Index started to be calculated by the Istanbul Stock Exchange (BIST) in 2014 to evaluate the sustainability performance of companies in Turkey. The main objective of this study is to present the importance of sustainability reports in Turkey. To this aim, the performances of 15 companies in the BIST Sustainability Index were compared the periods before and after entering the index. On the other hand, sustainability reporting practices should be encouraged to increase studies on this issue. In this context, to remain on the agenda of the issue is a further objective of this study. To achieve these objectives, the financial data of the companies in the period before and after entering to the BIST Sustainability Index were analyzed using t-test in Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) package. The results of the study showed that no significant difference between the performances of the companies in terms of the net profit margin, the return on assets and equity capital in these periods could be found. Therefore, it can be said that insufficient importance is given to sustainability issues in Turkey. The reasons for this situation might be considered as a lack of awareness due to the recent introduction and calculation of the index. It is expected that the awareness of firms and investors about sustainability will increase, and that they will demonstrate the necessary importance to this issue over time.

Keywords: BIST sustainability index, firm performance, sustainability, sustainability reporting.

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Authors: Mourtou Efstratia, Abdel-Badeeh M. Salem, Pavlidis George

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Hierarchical high-level PNs (HHPNs) with time versions are a useful tool to model systems in a variety of application domains, ranging from logistics to complex workflows. This paper addresses an application domain which is receiving more and more attention: procedure that arranges the final inpatient charge in payment-s office and their management. We shall prove that Petri net based analysis is able to improve the delays during the procedure, in order that inpatient charges could be more reliable and on time.

Keywords: eHealth, Petri-Nets, Hospital Services, InpatientCharges, Workflow Modeling.

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Authors: Hariton N. Costin, Sorin Puscoci, Cristian Rotariu, Bogdan Dionisie, Marinela C. Cimpoesu

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TELMES project aims to develop a securized multimedia system devoted to medical consultation teleservices. It will be finalized with a pilot system for a regional telecenters network that connects local telecenters, having as support multimedia platforms. This network will enable the implementation of complex medical teleservices (teleconsulations, telemonitoring, homecare, urgency medicine, etc.) for a broader range of patients and medical professionals, mainly for family doctors and those people living in rural or isolated regions. Thus, a multimedia, scalable network, based on modern IT&C paradigms, will result. It will gather two inter-connected regional telecenters, in Iaşi and Piteşti, Romania, each of them also permitting local connections of hospitals, diagnostic and treatment centers, as well as local networks of family doctors, patients, even educational entities. As communications infrastructure, we aim to develop a combined fixmobile- internet (broadband) links. Other possible communication environments will be GSM/GPRS/3G and radio waves. The electrocardiogram (ECG) acquisition, internet transmission and local analysis, using embedded technologies, was already successfully done for patients- telemonitoring.

Keywords: Healthcare, telemedicine, telemonitoring, ECG analysis.

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Authors: Amir Moslemi, Amir Movafeghi, Shahab Moradi

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One of the most important challenging factors in medical images is nominated as noise. Image denoising refers to the improvement of a digital medical image that has been infected by Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN). The digital medical image or video can be affected by different types of noises. They are impulse noise, Poisson noise and AWGN. Computed tomography (CT) images are subjects to low quality due to the noise. Quality of CT images is dependent on absorbed dose to patients directly in such a way that increase in absorbed radiation, consequently absorbed dose to patients (ADP), enhances the CT images quality. In this manner, noise reduction techniques on purpose of images quality enhancement exposing no excess radiation to patients is one the challenging problems for CT images processing. In this work, noise reduction in CT images was performed using two different directional 2 dimensional (2D) transformations; i.e., Curvelet and Contourlet and Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) thresholding methods of BayesShrink and AdaptShrink, compared to each other and we proposed a new threshold in wavelet domain for not only noise reduction but also edge retaining, consequently the proposed method retains the modified coefficients significantly that result good visual quality. Data evaluations were accomplished by using two criterions; namely, peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) and Structure similarity (Ssim).

Keywords: Computed Tomography (CT), noise reduction, curve-let, contour-let, Signal to Noise Peak-Peak Ratio (PSNR), Structure Similarity (Ssim), Absorbed Dose to Patient (ADP).

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Authors: H. El-Madbouly

Abstract:

In this paper, genetic algorithm (GA) is proposed for the design of an optimization algorithm to achieve the bandwidth allocation of ATM network. In Broadband ISDN, the ATM is a highbandwidth; fast packet switching and multiplexing technique. Using ATM it can be flexibly reconfigure the network and reassign the bandwidth to meet the requirements of all types of services. By dynamically routing the traffic and adjusting the bandwidth assignment, the average packet delay of the whole network can be reduced to a minimum. M/M/1 model can be used to analyze the performance.

Keywords: Bandwidth allocation, Genetic algorithm, ATMNetwork, packet delay.

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Authors: Alexandru George Floares

Abstract:

Chronic hepatitis B can evolve to cirrhosis and liver cancer. Interferon is the only effective treatment, for carefully selected patients, but it is very expensive. Some of the selection criteria are based on liver biopsy, an invasive, costly and painful medical procedure. Therefore, developing efficient non-invasive selection systems, could be in the patients benefit and also save money. We investigated the possibility to create intelligent systems to assist the Interferon therapeutical decision, mainly by predicting with acceptable accuracy the results of the biopsy. We used a knowledge discovery in integrated medical data - imaging, clinical, and laboratory data. The resulted intelligent systems, tested on 500 patients with chronic hepatitis B, based on C5.0 decision trees and boosting, predict with 100% accuracy the results of the liver biopsy. Also, by integrating the other patients selection criteria, they offer a non-invasive support for the correct Interferon therapeutic decision. To our best knowledge, these decision systems outperformed all similar systems published in the literature, and offer a realistic opportunity to replace liver biopsy in this medical context.

Keywords: Interferon, chronic hepatitis B, intelligent virtualbiopsy.

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