TEXTURAL CLASSIFICATION OF MULTIPLE SCLEROSISLESIONS IN MULTIMODAL MRI VOLUMES

Background and objectives:Multiple Sclerosis is a common relapsing demyelinating diseasecausing the significant degradation of cognitive and motor skills and contributes towards areduced life expectancy of 5 to 10 years. The identification of Multiple Sclerosis Lesionsat early stages of a patient’s life can play a significant role in the diagnosis, treatment andprognosis for that individual. In recent years the process of disease detection has been aidedthrough the implementation of radiomic pipelines for texture extraction and classificationutilising Computer Vision and Machine Learning techniques. Eight Multiple Sclerosis Patient datasets have been supplied, each containing one standardclinical T2 MRI sequence and four diffusion-weighted sequences (T2, FA, ADC, AD, RD).This work proposes a Multimodal Multiple Sclerosis Lesion segmentation methodology util-ising supervised texture analysis, feature selection and classification. Three Machine Learningmodels were applied to Multimodal MRI data and tested using unseen patient datasets to eval-uate the classification performance of various extracted features, feature selection algorithmsand classifiers to MRI volumes uncommonly applied to MS Lesion detection. Method: First Order Statistics, Haralick Texture Features, Gray-Level Run-Lengths, His-togram of Oriented Gradients and Local Binary Patterns were extracted from MRI volumeswhich were minimally pre-processed using a skull stripping and background removal algorithm.mRMR and LASSO feature selection algorithms were applied to identify a subset of rankingsfor use in Machine Learning using Support Vector Machine, Random Forests and ExtremeLearning Machine classification. Results: ELM achieved a top slice classification accuracy of 85% while SVM achieved 79%and RF 78%. It was found that combining information from all MRI sequences increased theclassification performance when analysing unseen T2 scans in almost all cases. LASSO andmRMR feature selection methods failed to increase accuracy, and the highest-scoring groupof features were Haralick Texture Features, derived from Grey-Level Co-occurrence matrices

Artifacts of Thinking

'Artifacts of Thinking: Reading Arendt’s 'Denktagebuch'' offers a path through Hannah Arendt’s recently published 'Denktagebuch', or 'Book of Thoughts.' In this book a number of innovative Arendt scholars come together to ask how we should think about these remarkable writings in the context of Arendt’s published writing and broader political thinking. Unique in its form, the 'Denktagebuch' offers brilliant insights into Arendt’s practice of thinking and writing. 'Artifacts of Thinking' provides an introduction to the 'Denktagebuch' as well as a glimpse of these fascinating but untranslated fragments that reveal not only Arendt’s understanding of “the life of the mind” but her true lived experience of it

Same game, no winners : COVID-19, U.S.-China rivalry, and Southeast Asian geopolitics

For more about the East-West Center, see http://www.eastwestcenter.org/Ian Storey and Malcolm Cook, Senior Fellow and Visiting Senior Fellow, respectively, at ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, Singapore, explain that "In Southeast Asia, what we are witnessing thus far is less a rupture event and more an amplification of the current geopolitical dynamics.

China’s Aircraft Carrier Ambitions

For more than a decade there have been persistent reports that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) intends to acquire an aircraft carrier force as part of its ambition to achieve “blue-water” (high seas) naval capability. Some reports suggest that China plans to refit one or more aircraft carriers from the former Soviet Union or other countries. Others claim that China has investigated the possibility of buying a light aircraft carrier from a European shipbuilder. Other reports suggest China has already made the decision to build two or three indig- enous carriers and has even allocated funding for the program

Artifacts of Thinking

'Artifacts of Thinking: Reading Arendt’s 'Denktagebuch'' offers a path through Hannah Arendt’s recently published 'Denktagebuch', or 'Book of Thoughts.' In this book a number of innovative Arendt scholars come together to ask how we should think about these remarkable writings in the context of Arendt’s published writing and broader political thinking. Unique in its form, the 'Denktagebuch' offers brilliant insights into Arendt’s practice of thinking and writing. 'Artifacts of Thinking' provides an introduction to the 'Denktagebuch' as well as a glimpse of these fascinating but untranslated fragments that reveal not only Arendt’s understanding of “the life of the mind” but her true lived experience of it

A Conceptual Framework for Accountability in Cloud Computing Service Provision

This paper uses a comprehensive review of the academic and professional literature in relation to accountability in the area of cloud computing service provision. It identifies four key conceptual factors that are necessary for an organisation to be considered as accountable. The four factors were found to be: responsibility, assurance, transparency and remediation. A key finding of the paper is that in order to be considered as an accountable cloud service provider, all four factors need to be implemented and be demonstrable by the organisation

Literature-based analysis of the influences of the new forces on ISMS: A conceptual framework

This paper presents an analysis that arose from a comprehensive review of the academic and professional literature of two areas – information security management systems (ISMS) and information resources – and their relationship with information security. It analyzes the role of ISMS in protecting an organization’s information environment and infrastructure. It has identified four key areas that strongly influence the safety of information resources: cloud computing; social media/networking; mobility; and information management/big data. Commonly referred to as ‘new forces’, these four aspects are all growing exponentially and are not easily controlled by IT. Another key finding of the paper is that organizations aiming to protect their information resources need to adapt their ISMS in an environment where these new forces have exposed them to a range of external entities and influences

Core elements in information security accountability in the cloud

This paper proposes 9 core elements of information security accountability in the area of cloud computing. The core elements were determined via a series of 18 case studies with Omani government organisations that were actively using and/or providing cloud computing. 36 interviews were conducted and then analysed using a grounded theory methodology As a result of the analysis, responsibility, transparency, assurance, remediation, accountability support environment, flexible change process, collaboration, mechanisms and commitment to external criteria. The research also found that the emphasis on specific core elements is context-dependent and that there was considerable variation in emphasis amongst the case study organisations