Search results for: Emergency Medical Services
990 eTax Filing and Service Quality: The Case of the Revenue Online Service
Authors: Regina Connolly, Frank Bannister
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This paper describes an ongoing study into the quality of service provided by the Irish Revenue Commisioners- online tax filing and collection system. The Irish Revenue On-Line Service (ROS) site has won several awards. In this study, a version of the widely use SERVQUAL measuring instrument, adapted for use with online services, has been modified for the specific case of ROS. In this paper, the theory behind this instrument is set out, the particular problems of evaluating revenue collecting online are examined and the rationale for this approach is explained.
Keywords: E-service quality, revenue online system, online tax filing system.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 2546989 Joint Transmitter-Receiver Optimization for Bonded Wireline Communications
Authors: Mohammed H. Nafie, Ahmed F. Shalash
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With the advent of DSL services, high data rates are now available over phone lines, yet higher rates are in demand. In this paper, we optimize the transmit filters that can be used over wireline channels. Results showing the bit error rates when optimized filters are used, and with a decision feedback equalizer (DFE) employed in the receiver, are given. We then show that significantly higher throughput can be achieved by modeling the channel as a multiple input multiple output (MIMO) channel. A receiver that employs a MIMO-DFE that deals jointly with several users is proposed and shown to provide significant improvement over the conventional DFE.
Keywords: DFE, MIMO Channels, Receiver Architectures, Transmit Filters.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 1352988 Conflicts and Compromise at the Management of Transboundry Water Resources (The Case of the Central Asia)
Authors: Sobir T. Navruzov
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The problem of complex use of water resources in Central Asia by taking into consideration the sovereignty of the states and increasing demand on use of water for economic aspects are considered. Complex program with appropriate mathematical software intended for calculation of possible variants of using the Amudarya up-stream water resources according to satisfaction of incompatible requirements of the national economics in irrigation and energy generation is proposed.Keywords: water resources, national economics, irrigation, transboundry, energy generation, optimal solution, program complex, up-stream, down-stream, compensating services.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 1356987 Synthetic Transmit Aperture Method in Medical Ultrasonic Imaging
Authors: Ihor Trots, Andrzej Nowicki, Marcin Lewandowski
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The work describes the use of a synthetic transmit aperture (STA) with a single element transmitting and all elements receiving in medical ultrasound imaging. STA technique is a novel approach to today-s commercial systems, where an image is acquired sequentially one image line at a time that puts a strict limit on the frame rate and the amount of data needed for high image quality. The STA imaging allows to acquire data simultaneously from all directions over a number of emissions, and the full image can be reconstructed. In experiments a 32-element linear transducer array with 0.48 mm inter-element spacing was used. Single element transmission aperture was used to generate a spherical wave covering the full image region. The 2D ultrasound images of wire phantom are presented obtained using the STA and commercial ultrasound scanner Antares to demonstrate the benefits of the SA imaging.Keywords: Ultrasound imaging, synthetic aperture, frame rate, beamforming.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 2104986 QoS Management in the Future Internet
Authors: S. Rao, S. Khavtasi, C. Chassot, N. Van Wambeke, F. Armando, S. P. Romano, T. Castaldi
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The talks about technological convergence had been around for almost twenty years. Today Internet made it possible. And this is not only technical evolution. The way it changed our lives reflected in variety of applications, services and technologies used in day-to-day life. Such benefits imposed even more requirements on heterogeneous and unreliable IP networks. Current paper outlines QoS management system developed in the NetQoS [1] project. It describes an overall architecture of management system for heterogeneous networks and proposes automated multi-layer QoS management. Paper focuses on the structure of the most crucial modules of the system that enable autonomous and multi-layer provisioning and dynamic adaptation.Keywords: Automated QoS management, multi-layerprovisioning and adaptation, QoS, QoE.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 1482985 Web portal As A Knowledge Management System In The Universities
Authors: Marjan Mansourvar, Norizan Mohd Yasin
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The development of Web has affected different aspects of our lives, such as communication, sharing knowledge, searching for jobs, social activities, etc. The web portal as a gateway in the World Wide Web is a starting point for people who are connecting to the Internet. The web portal as the type of knowledge management system provides a rich space to share and search information as well as communication services like free email or content provision for the users. This research aims to discover the university needs to the web portal as a necessary tool for students in the universities to help them in getting the required information. A survey was conducted to gather students' requirements which can be incorporated in to portal to be developed.
Keywords: Knowledge, Knowledge management system, Knowledge sharing, web portal.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 1890984 The Effect of Natural Light on the Performance of Visible Light Communication Systems
Authors: Mahmoud Beshr, Ivan Andonovic, Moustafa H. Aly
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Visible Light Communication (VLC) offers advantages of low energy consumption, licence free and RF interference free operation. One application area for VLC is in the provision of health centred services circumventing issues of interference with any biomedical device within the environment. VLC performamce is affected by natural light restricting systems avilability and relibility. The paper presents an analysis of the performance of VLC systems under different meteorological conditions. The evaluation considered the impact of natural light as a function of different reflection surfaces in different room sizes.
Keywords: Visible light communication, impulse reponse , performance analysis , natural light.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 1708983 Novel Hybrid Method for Gene Selection and Cancer Prediction
Authors: Liping Jing, Michael K. Ng, Tieyong Zeng
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Microarray data profiles gene expression on a whole genome scale, therefore, it provides a good way to study associations between gene expression and occurrence or progression of cancer. More and more researchers realized that microarray data is helpful to predict cancer sample. However, the high dimension of gene expressions is much larger than the sample size, which makes this task very difficult. Therefore, how to identify the significant genes causing cancer becomes emergency and also a hot and hard research topic. Many feature selection algorithms have been proposed in the past focusing on improving cancer predictive accuracy at the expense of ignoring the correlations between the features. In this work, a novel framework (named by SGS) is presented for stable gene selection and efficient cancer prediction . The proposed framework first performs clustering algorithm to find the gene groups where genes in each group have higher correlation coefficient, and then selects the significant genes in each group with Bayesian Lasso and important gene groups with group Lasso, and finally builds prediction model based on the shrinkage gene space with efficient classification algorithm (such as, SVM, 1NN, Regression and etc.). Experiment results on real world data show that the proposed framework often outperforms the existing feature selection and prediction methods, say SAM, IG and Lasso-type prediction model.Keywords: Gene Selection, Cancer Prediction, Lasso, Clustering, Classification.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 2044982 Poisoning Admission in Children Hospital in Benghazi-Libya, Three Years Review of Medical Record
Authors: Mudafara S Bengleil
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Estimation of the magnitude and causes of poisoning was the objective of the current study. A retrospective study of medical records of all poisoning children admitted to Benghazi Children Hospital in Libya from January 2008 up to December 2010. Number of children admitted was 244; the age ranged from less than one to 13 years old. Most of cases were admitted with mild symptom and the majority of them were boys. Only few cases admitted to intensive care unit and there was no mortality recorded through the period of study. Age group 1 to 3 years (50.8%) had the highest frequency of admission and the peak of admission was during summer. The most common cause of admission was due to ingestion of medication (53.69%), House hold product exposure (26.64%) was the second causes of admission while, 19.67% of admissions were due to Food poisoning. Almost all admitted cases were accidental and medicines were the most consumed substances in addition, improper storage of toxic agents were the first risk factor of poisoning. Present results indicated that, children poisoning seems to be a common pediatric care problem which need to control and prevent.
Keywords: Children, hospital, poisoning.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 1882981 Canonical PSO based Nanorobot Control for Blood Vessel Repair
Authors: Pinfa Boonrong, Boonserm Kaewkamnerdpong
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As nanotechnology advances, the use of nanotechnology for medical purposes in the field of nanomedicine seems more promising; the rise of nanorobots for medical diagnostics and treatments could be arriving in the near future. This study proposes a swarm intelligence based control mechanism for swarm nanorobots that operate as artificial platelets to search for wounds. The canonical particle swarm optimization algorithm is employed in this study. A simulation in the circulatory system is constructed and used for demonstrating the movement of nanorobots with essential characteristics to examine the performance of proposed control mechanism. The effects of three nanorobot capabilities including their perception range, maximum velocity and respond time are investigated. The results show that canonical particle swarm optimization can be used to control the early version nanorobots with simple behaviors and actions.
Keywords: Artificial platelets, canonical particle swarm optimization, nanomedicine, nanorobot, swarm intelligence.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 2687980 Exploring the Applicability of a Rapid Health Assessment in India
Authors: Claudia Carbajal, Jija Dutt, Smriti Pahwa, Sumukhi Vaid, Karishma Vats
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ASER Centre, the research and assessment arm of Pratham Education Foundation sees measurement as the first stage of action. ASER uses primary research to push and give empirical foundations to policy discussions at a multitude of levels. At a household level, common citizens use a simple assessment (a floor-level test) to measure learning across rural India. This paper presents the evidence on the applicability of an ASER approach to the health sector. A citizen-led assessment was designed and executed that collected information from young mothers with children up to a year of age. The pilot assessments were rolled-out in two different models: Paid surveyors and student volunteers. The survey covered three geographic areas: 1,239 children in the Jaipur District of Rajasthan, 2,086 in the Rae Bareli District of Uttar Pradesh, and 593 children in the Bhuj Block in Gujarat. The survey tool was designed to study knowledge of health-related issues, daily practices followed by young mothers and access to relevant services and programs. It provides insights on behaviors related to infant and young child feeding practices, child and maternal nutrition and supplementation, water and sanitation, and health services. Moreover, the survey studies the reasons behind behaviors giving policy-makers actionable pathways to improve implementation of social sector programs. Although data on health outcomes are available, this approach could provide a rapid annual assessment of health issues with indicators that are easy to understand and act upon so that measurements do not become an exclusive domain of experts. The results give many insights into early childhood health behaviors and challenges. Around 98% of children are breastfed, and approximately half are not exclusively breastfed (for the first 6 months). Government established diet diversity guidelines are met for less than 1 out of 10 children. Although most households are satisfied with the quality of drinking water, most tested households had contaminated water.
Keywords: Citizen-led assessment, infant and young children feeding, maternal nutrition, rapid health assessment supplementation, water and sanitation.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 1793979 Enhancing Seamless Communication Through a user Co-designed Wearable Device
Authors: A. Marcengo, A. Rapp, E. Guercio
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This work aims to describe the process of developing services and applications of seamless communication within a Telecom Italia long-term research project, which takes as central aim the design of a wearable communication device. In particular, the objective was to design a wrist phone integrated into everyday life of people in full transparency. The methodology used to design the wristwatch was developed through several subsequent steps also involving the Personas Layering Framework. The data collected in this phases have been very useful for designing an improved version of the first two concepts of wrist phone going to change aspects related to the four critical points expressed by the users.Keywords: Design, Interaction, User Centred Design, Wristphone.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 1278978 Visual Text Analytics Technologies for Real-Time Big Data: Chronological Evolution and Issues
Authors: Siti Azrina B. A. Aziz, Siti Hafizah A. Hamid
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New approaches to analyze and visualize data stream in real-time basis is important in making a prompt decision by the decision maker. Financial market trading and surveillance, large-scale emergency response and crowd control are some example scenarios that require real-time analytic and data visualization. This situation has led to the development of techniques and tools that support humans in analyzing the source data. With the emergence of Big Data and social media, new techniques and tools are required in order to process the streaming data. Today, ranges of tools which implement some of these functionalities are available. In this paper, we present chronological evolution evaluation of technologies for supporting of real-time analytic and visualization of the data stream. Based on the past research papers published from 2002 to 2014, we gathered the general information, main techniques, challenges and open issues. The techniques for streaming text visualization are identified based on Text Visualization Browser in chronological order. This paper aims to review the evolution of streaming text visualization techniques and tools, as well as to discuss the problems and challenges for each of identified tools.Keywords: Information visualization, visual analytics, text mining, visual text analytics tools, big data visualization.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 1002977 Orders Preparation and Control on the Productive Process Efficiency Preparation
Authors: F. Charrua-Santos, S. Dias, J. Matias, F. Brójo, S. Azevedo.
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The main objective of this paper is to analyse the influence of preparation and control of orders on performance. The focused activities explored in this research are: procurement, production and distribution. These changes in performance were obtained through improvement of the supply chain. It is proved using all the company activities that it is possible to increase de efficiency and do services in an adequate way, placing the products in the market efficiently. For that, it was explored the importance of the supply chain, with privilege to the practical environment and the quantification of the obtained results.
Keywords: Competitiveness, Order Preparation and Control, Procurement Process and Operations Efficiency, Supply Chain Global Costs
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 1506976 Analysis on Fun Elements of the SNG in ANIPANG
Authors: Jangwon Lee, Joonsung Yoon
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This study analyzes on the Social Network Game (SNG), ANIPANG, in order to discover its unique fun elements, so that suggest new methodologies for development of SNGs. ANIPANG is the most popular SNG in the South Korea on 2012. Recently, the game industry is paying close attention to mobile-based SNGs due to the rapid prevalence of smart-phones and social network services. However, SNGs are not online games simply. Although the fun of most online games is the victory through competition with other players or the game system, the fun of SNG is the communication through the collaboration with other players. Thus, features of users and environments of game should be considered for the game industry and for the fun of SNG to users.Keywords: Social Network Game, Casual user, Fun, ANIPANG.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 1601975 Performance Analysis of Brain Tumor Detection Based On Image Fusion
Authors: S. Anbumozhi, P. S. Manoharan
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Medical Image fusion plays a vital role in medical field to diagnose the brain tumors which can be classified as benign or malignant. It is the process of integrating multiple images of the same scene into a single fused image to reduce uncertainty and minimizing redundancy while extracting all the useful information from the source images. Fuzzy logic is used to fuse two brain MRI images with different vision. The fused image will be more informative than the source images. The texture and wavelet features are extracted from the fused image. The multilevel Adaptive Neuro Fuzzy Classifier classifies the brain tumors based on trained and tested features. The proposed method achieved 80.48% sensitivity, 99.9% specificity and 99.69% accuracy. Experimental results obtained from fusion process prove that the use of the proposed image fusion approach shows better performance while compared with conventional fusion methodologies.
Keywords: Image fusion, Fuzzy rules, Neuro-fuzzy classifier.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 3058974 Q-Map: Clinical Concept Mining from Clinical Documents
Authors: Sheikh Shams Azam, Manoj Raju, Venkatesh Pagidimarri, Vamsi Kasivajjala
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Over the past decade, there has been a steep rise in the data-driven analysis in major areas of medicine, such as clinical decision support system, survival analysis, patient similarity analysis, image analytics etc. Most of the data in the field are well-structured and available in numerical or categorical formats which can be used for experiments directly. But on the opposite end of the spectrum, there exists a wide expanse of data that is intractable for direct analysis owing to its unstructured nature which can be found in the form of discharge summaries, clinical notes, procedural notes which are in human written narrative format and neither have any relational model nor any standard grammatical structure. An important step in the utilization of these texts for such studies is to transform and process the data to retrieve structured information from the haystack of irrelevant data using information retrieval and data mining techniques. To address this problem, the authors present Q-Map in this paper, which is a simple yet robust system that can sift through massive datasets with unregulated formats to retrieve structured information aggressively and efficiently. It is backed by an effective mining technique which is based on a string matching algorithm that is indexed on curated knowledge sources, that is both fast and configurable. The authors also briefly examine its comparative performance with MetaMap, one of the most reputed tools for medical concepts retrieval and present the advantages the former displays over the latter.Keywords: Information retrieval (IR), unified medical language system (UMLS), Syntax Based Analysis, natural language processing (NLP), medical informatics.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 779973 Bandwidth Enhancement in CPW Fed Compact Rectangular Patch Antenna
Authors: Kirti Vyas, P. K. Singhal
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This paper presents a novel CPW fed patch antenna supporting a wide band from 2.7 GHz – 6.5 GHz. The antenna is compact with size 32 x 30 x 1.6mm3, built over FR4-epoxy substrate (εr=4.4). Bandwidth enhancement has been achieved by using the concept of modified ground structure (MGS). For this purpose structural design has been optimized by parametric simulations in CST MWS. The proposed antenna can perform well in variety of wireless communication services including 5.15 GHz- 5.35 GHz and 5.725 GHz- 5.825 GHz WLAN IEEE 802.11 g/a, 5.2/ 5.5/ 5.8 GHz Wi-Fi, 3.5/5.5 GHz WiMax applications and 3.7 - 4.2 GHz C band satellite communications bands. The measured experimental results show that bandwidth (S11 < -10 dB) of antenna is 3.8 GHz. The performance of antenna is studied in terms of reflection coefficient, radiation characteristics, current distribution and gain.
Keywords: Broad band antenna, Compact, CPW fed, WLAN, Wi-Fi, Wi-Max, CST MWS.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 2874972 Biological Data Integration using SOA
Authors: Noura Meshaan Al-Otaibi, Amin Yousef Noaman
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Nowadays scientific data is inevitably digital and stored in a wide variety of formats in heterogeneous systems. Scientists need to access an integrated view of remote or local heterogeneous data sources with advanced data accessing, analyzing, and visualization tools. This research suggests the use of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to integrate biological data from different data sources. This work shows SOA will solve the problems that facing integration process and if the biologist scientists can access the biological data in easier way. There are several methods to implement SOA but web service is the most popular method. The Microsoft .Net Framework used to implement proposed architecture.Keywords: Bioinformatics, Biological data, Data Integration, SOA and Web Services.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 2474971 Security Threat and Countermeasure on 3G Network
Authors: Dongwan Kang, Joohyung Oh, Chaetae Im
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Recent communications environment significantly expands the mobile environment. The popularization of smartphones with various mobile services has emerged, and smartphone users are rapidly increasing. Because of these symptoms, existing wired environment in a variety of mobile traffic entering to mobile network has threatened the stability of the mobile network. Unlike traditional wired infrastructure, mobile networks has limited radio resources and signaling procedures for complex radio resource management. So these traffic is not a problem in wired networks but mobile networks, it can be a threat. In this paper, we analyze the security threats in mobile networks and provide direction to solve it.Keywords: 3G, Core Network Security, GTP, Mobile NetworkSecurity
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 2141970 Studying the Relationship between Different Dimensions of CRM and Innovation Capabilities in Melli Bank of Iran
Authors: Peyman Ghafari, Reza Karjalian, Ali Mashayekhnia
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This paper investigates the relationship between different dimensions of customer relationship management and innovation capabilities in Melli Bank of Iran. Five dimensions of CRM include information sharing, customer involvement, long-term partnership, joint problem solving and technology-based CRM are selected to measure their relationship with innovation capabilities including innovation in product, innovation in process, innovation in administrative affairs, innovation in marketing, and finally innovation in services. Research findings indicate that there is significant relationship between CRM dimensions and innovation capabilities in Melli bank of Iran.
Keywords: Customer relationship management, innovation capabilities.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 2069969 Adding Security Blocks to the DevOps Lifecycle
Authors: Andrew John Zeller, Francis Pouatcha
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Working according to the DevOps principle has gained in popularity over the past decade. While its extension DevSecOps started to include elements of cybersecurity, most real-life projects do not focus risk and security until the later phases of a project as teams are often more familiar with engineering and infrastructure services. To help bridge the gap between security and engineering, this paper will take six building blocks of cybersecurity and apply them to the DevOps approach. After giving a brief overview of the stages in the DevOps lifecycle, the main part discusses to what extent six cybersecurity blocks can be utilized in various stages of the lifecycle. The paper concludes with an outlook on how to stay up to date in the dynamic world of cybersecurity.
Keywords: Information security, data security, cybersecurity, DevOps, IT management.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 117968 Analysis of a Population of Diabetic Patients Databases with Classifiers
Authors: Murat Koklu, Yavuz Unal
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Data mining can be called as a technique to extract information from data. It is the process of obtaining hidden information and then turning it into qualified knowledge by statistical and artificial intelligence technique. One of its application areas is medical area to form decision support systems for diagnosis just by inventing meaningful information from given medical data. In this study a decision support system for diagnosis of illness that make use of data mining and three different artificial intelligence classifier algorithms namely Multilayer Perceptron, Naive Bayes Classifier and J.48. Pima Indian dataset of UCI Machine Learning Repository was used. This dataset includes urinary and blood test results of 768 patients. These test results consist of 8 different feature vectors. Obtained classifying results were compared with the previous studies. The suggestions for future studies were presented.
Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Classifiers, Data Mining, Diabetic Patients.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 5431967 When Scientific Laws and Findings Encounter Life: A Traditional Chinese Medicine Perspective
Authors: Eric Y. Zhang, L. Acu
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This paper is to point out the limitations of modern medical research and why the Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) can help address the limitations. Many of the modern medical research results are based on the findings in fundamental research disciplines, such as physics, and chemistry. However, this foundation is not as solid as it seems. The theory proposed in this paper, the Law of Chasm, or the Chasm Theory, states that there are two categories of objects to be studied. One is non-life objects, or lifeless objects; the other is living beings, or the objects that are alive. The laws and findings obtained by studying non-life objects may not all be extended to living beings, and vice versa. TCM is the study of medicine based on living beings. Therefore, TCM findings may not exist in the body of the knowledge obtained from studying non-life objects.
Keywords: TCM, Traditional Chinese Medicine, Law of Chasm, Chasm Theory, living-beings, non-life.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 234966 Privacy Issues in Pervasive Healthcare Monitoring System: A Review
Authors: Rusyaizila Ramli, Nasriah Zakaria, Putra Sumari
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Privacy issues commonly discussed among researchers, practitioners, and end-users in pervasive healthcare. Pervasive healthcare systems are applications that can support patient-s need anytime and anywhere. However, pervasive healthcare raises privacy concerns since it can lead to situations where patients may not be aware that their private information is being shared and becomes vulnerable to threat. We have systematically analyzed the privacy issues and present a summary in tabular form to show the relationship among the issues. The six issues identified are medical information misuse, prescription leakage, medical information eavesdropping, social implications for the patient, patient difficulties in managing privacy settings, and lack of support in designing privacy-sensitive applications. We narrow down the issues and chose to focus on the issue of 'lack of support in designing privacysensitive applications' by proposing a privacy-sensitive architecture specifically designed for pervasive healthcare monitoring systems.Keywords: Human Factors, Pervasive Healthcare, PrivacyIssues
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 2925965 An Improved C-Means Model for MRI Segmentation
Authors: Ying Shen, Weihua Zhu
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Medical images are important to help identifying different diseases, for example, Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) can be used to investigate the brain, spinal cord, bones, joints, breasts, blood vessels, and heart. Image segmentation, in medical image analysis, is usually the first step to find out some characteristics with similar color, intensity or texture so that the diagnosis could be further carried out based on these features. This paper introduces an improved C-means model to segment the MRI images. The model is based on information entropy to evaluate the segmentation results by achieving global optimization. Several contributions are significant. Firstly, Genetic Algorithm (GA) is used for achieving global optimization in this model where fuzzy C-means clustering algorithm (FCMA) is not capable of doing that. Secondly, the information entropy after segmentation is used for measuring the effectiveness of MRI image processing. Experimental results show the outperformance of the proposed model by comparing with traditional approaches.
Keywords: Magnetic Resonance Image, C-means model, image segmentation, information entropy.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 918964 A Comparative Analysis of Performance and QoS Issues in MANETs
Authors: Javed Parvez, Mushtaq Ahmad Peer
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Mobile Ad hoc networks (MANETs) are collections of wireless mobile nodes dynamically reconfiguring and collectively forming a temporary network. These types of networks assume existence of no fixed infrastructure and are often useful in battle-field tactical operations or emergency search-and-rescue type of operations where fixed infrastructure is neither feasible nor practical. They also find use in ad hoc conferences, campus networks and commercial recreational applications carrying multimedia traffic. All of the above applications of MANETs require guaranteed levels of performance as experienced by the end-user. This paper focuses on key challenges in provisioning predetermined levels of such Quality of Service (QoS). It also identifies functional areas where QoS models are currently defined and used. Evolving functional areas where performance and QoS provisioning may be applied are also identified and some suggestions are provided for further research in this area. Although each of the above functional areas have been discussed separately in recent research studies, since these QoS functional areas are highly correlated and interdependent, a comprehensive and comparative analysis of these areas and their interrelationships is desired. In this paper we have attempted to provide such an overview.Keywords: Bandwidth Reservation, Congestion, DynamicNetwork Topology, End-to-End Delay, Flexible QoS Model forMANET(FQMM), Hidden Terminal, Mobile AdhocNetwork(MANET), Packet Jitter, Queuing, Quality-of-Service(QoS), Relative Bandwidth Service Differentiation(RBSD), Resource ReSerVation Protocol (RSVP).
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 2146963 Relationship-Centred Care in Cross-Linguistic Medical Encounters
Authors: Nami Matsumoto
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This study explores the experiences of cross-linguistic medical encounters by patients, and their views of receiving language support therein, with a particular focus on Japanese-English cases. The aim of this study is to investigate the reason for the frequent use of a spouse as a communication mediator from a Japanese perspective, through a comparison with that of English speakers. This study conducts an empirical qualitative analysis of the accounts of informants. A total of 31 informants who have experienced Japanese-English cross-linguistic medical encounters were recruited in Australia and Japan for semi-structured in-depth interviews. A breakdown of informants is 15 English speakers and 16 Japanese speakers. In order to obtain a further insight into collected data, additional interviews were held with 4 Australian doctors who are familiar with using interpreters. This study was approved by the Australian National University Human Research Ethics Committee, and written consent to participate in this study was obtained from all participants. The interviews lasted up to over one hour. They were audio-recorded and subsequently transcribed by the author. Japanese transcriptions were translated into English by the author. An analysis of interview data found that patients value relationship in communication. Particularly, Japanese informants, who have an English-speaking spouse, value trust-based communication interventions by their spouse, regardless of the language proficiency of the spouse. In Australia, health care interpreters are required to abide by the national code of ethics for interpreters. The Code defines the role of an interpreter exclusively to be language rendition and enshrines the tenets of accuracy, confidentiality and professional role boundaries. However, the analysis found that an interpreter who strictly complies with the Code sometimes fails to render the real intentions of the patient and their doctor. Findings from the study suggest that an interpreter should not be detached from the context and should be more engaged in the needs of patients. Their needs are not always communicated by an interpreter when they simply follow a professional code of ethics. The concept of relationship-centred care should be incorporated in the professional practice of health care interpreters.
Keywords: Health care, Japanese-English medical encounters, language barriers, trust.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 1261962 A study on a Generic Development Process for the BPM+SOA Design and Implementation
Authors: Toshimi Munehira
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In order to optimize annual IT spending and to reduce the complexity of an entire system architecture, SOA trials have been started. It is common knowledge that to design an SOA system we have to adopt the top-down approach, but in reality silo systems are being made, so these companies cannot reuse newly designed services, and cannot enjoy SOA-s economic benefits. To prevent this situation, we designed a generic SOA development process referred to as the architecture of “mass customization." To define the generic detail development processes, we did a case study on an imaginary company. Through the case study, we could define the practical development processes and found this could vastly reduce updating development costs.Keywords: SOA, BPM, Generic Model, MassCustomization
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 1456961 Biomechanics Analysis When Delivering Baby
Authors: Kristyanto B.
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Plenty of analyses based on Biomechanics were carried out on many jobs in manufactures or services. Now Biomechanics analysis is being applied on mothers who are giving birth. The analysis conducted in terms of normal condition of the birth process without Gyn Bed (Obstetric Bed). The aim of analysis is to study whether it is risky or not when choosing the position of mother’s postures when delivering the baby. This investigation was applied on two positions that generally appear in common birth process. Results will show the analysis of both positions to support the birth process based on the Biomechanics analysis (Ergonomic approaches).
Keywords: Biomechanics analysis, Birth process, Position of postures analysis, Ergonomic approaches.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 2302