27,421 research outputs found
The organizational implications of medical imaging in the context of Malaysian hospitals
This research investigated the implementation and use of medical imaging in the
context of Malaysian hospitals. In this report medical imaging refers to PACS,
RIS/HIS and imaging modalities which are linked through a computer network. The
study examined how the internal context of a hospital and its external context
together influenced the implementation of medical imaging, and how this in turn
shaped organizational roles and relationships within the hospital itself. It further
investigated how the implementation of the technology in one hospital affected its
implementation in another hospital. The research used systems theory as the
theoretical framework for the study. Methodologically, the study used a case-based
approach and multiple methods to obtain data. The case studies included two
hospital-based radiology departments in Malaysia.
The outcomes of the research suggest that the implementation of medical imaging in
community hospitals is shaped by the external context particularly the role played by
the Ministry of Health. Furthermore, influences from both the internal and external
contexts have a substantial impact on the process of implementing medical imaging
and the extent of the benefits that the organization can gain. In the context of roles
and social relationships, the findings revealed that the routine use of medical
imaging has substantially affected radiographersâ roles, and the social relationships
between non clinical personnel and clinicians. This study found no change in the
relationship between radiographers and radiologists. Finally, the approaches to
implementation taken in the hospitals studied were found to influence those taken by
other hospitals.
Overall, this study makes three important contributions. Firstly, it extends Barleyâs
(1986, 1990) research by explicitly demonstrating that the organizationâs internal and
external contexts together shape the implementation and use of technology, that the
processes of implementing and using technology impact upon roles, relationships
and networks and that a role-based approach alone is inadequate to examine the
outcomes of deploying an advanced technology. Secondly, this study contends that
scalability of technology in the context of developing countries is not necessarily
linear. Finally, this study offers practical contributions that can benefit healthcare
organizations in Malaysia
How can SMEs benefit from big data? Challenges and a path forward
Big data is big news, and large companies in all sectors are making significant advances in their customer relations, product selection and development and consequent profitability through using this valuable commodity. Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) have proved themselves to be slow adopters of the new technology of big data analytics and are in danger of being left behind. In Europe, SMEs are a vital part of the economy, and the challenges they encounter need to be addressed as a matter of urgency. This paper identifies barriers to SME uptake of big data analytics and recognises their complex challenge to all stakeholders, including national and international policy makers, IT, business management and data science communities.
The paper proposes a big data maturity model for SMEs as a first step towards an SME roadmap to data analytics. It considers the âstate-of-the-artâ of IT with respect to usability and usefulness for SMEs and discusses how SMEs can overcome the barriers preventing them from adopting existing solutions. The paper then considers management perspectives and the role of maturity models in enhancing and structuring the adoption of data analytics in an organisation. The history of total quality management is reviewed to inform the core aspects of implanting a new paradigm. The paper concludes with recommendations to help SMEs develop their big data capability and enable them to continue as the engines of European industrial and business success. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
CU2CL: A CUDA-to-OpenCL Translator for Multi- and Many-core Architectures
The use of graphics processing units (GPUs) in
high-performance parallel computing continues to become more
prevalent, often as part of a heterogeneous system. For years,
CUDA has been the de facto programming environment for
nearly all general-purpose GPU (GPGPU) applications. In spite
of this, the framework is available only on NVIDIA GPUs,
traditionally requiring reimplementation in other frameworks
in order to utilize additional multi- or many-core devices.
On the other hand, OpenCL provides an open and vendorneutral
programming environment and runtime system. With
implementations available for CPUs, GPUs, and other types of
accelerators, OpenCL therefore holds the promise of a âwrite
once, run anywhereâ ecosystem for heterogeneous computing.
Given the many similarities between CUDA and OpenCL,
manually porting a CUDA application to OpenCL is typically
straightforward, albeit tedious and error-prone. In response
to this issue, we created CU2CL, an automated CUDA-to-
OpenCL source-to-source translator that possesses a novel design
and clever reuse of the Clang compiler framework. Currently,
the CU2CL translator covers the primary constructs found in
CUDA runtime API, and we have successfully translated many
applications from the CUDA SDK and Rodinia benchmark suite.
The performance of our automatically translated applications via
CU2CL is on par with their manually ported countparts
Building an Emulation Environment for Cyber Security Analyses of Complex Networked Systems
Computer networks are undergoing a phenomenal growth, driven by the rapidly
increasing number of nodes constituting the networks. At the same time, the
number of security threats on Internet and intranet networks is constantly
growing, and the testing and experimentation of cyber defense solutions
requires the availability of separate, test environments that best emulate the
complexity of a real system. Such environments support the deployment and
monitoring of complex mission-driven network scenarios, thus enabling the study
of cyber defense strategies under real and controllable traffic and attack
scenarios. In this paper, we propose a methodology that makes use of a
combination of techniques of network and security assessment, and the use of
cloud technologies to build an emulation environment with adjustable degree of
affinity with respect to actual reference networks or planned systems. As a
byproduct, starting from a specific study case, we collected a dataset
consisting of complete network traces comprising benign and malicious traffic,
which is feature-rich and publicly available
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