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 radiographers’ 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 Barley’s (1986, 1990) research by explicitly demonstrating that the organization’s 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

Brain Activity Mapping from MEG Data via a Hierarchical Bayesian Algorithm with Automatic Depth Weighting

A recently proposed iterated alternating sequential (IAS) MEG inverse solver algorithm, based on the coupling of a hierarchical Bayesian model with computationally efficient Krylov subspace linear solver, has been shown to perform well for both superficial and deep brain sources. However, a systematic study of its ability to correctly identify active brain regions is still missing. We propose novel statistical protocols to quantify the performance of MEG inverse solvers, focusing in particular on how their accuracy and precision at identifying active brain regions. We use these protocols for a systematic study of the performance of the IAS MEG inverse solver, comparing it with three standard inversion methods, wMNE, dSPM, and sLORETA. To avoid the bias of anecdotal tests towards a particular algorithm, the proposed protocols are Monte Carlo sampling based, generating an ensemble of activity patches in each brain region identified in a given atlas. The performance in correctly identifying the active areas is measured by how much, on average, the reconstructed activity is concentrated in the brain region of the simulated active patch. The analysis is based on Bayes factors, interpreting the estimated current activity as data for testing the hypothesis that the active brain region is correctly identified, versus the hypothesis of any erroneous attribution. The methodology allows the presence of a single or several simultaneous activity regions, without assuming that the number of active regions is known. The testing protocols suggest that the IAS solver performs well with both with cortical and subcortical activity estimation

Field dependence of non-reciprocal magnons in chiral MnSi

Spin waves in chiral magnetic materials are strongly influenced by the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction resulting in intriguing phenomena like non-reciprocal magnon propagation and magnetochiral dichroism. Here, we study the non-reciprocal magnon spectrum of the archetypical chiral magnet MnSi and its evolution as a function of magnetic field covering the field-polarized and conical helix phase. Using inelastic neutron scattering, the magnon energies and their spectral weights are determined quantitatively after deconvolution with the instrumental resolution. In the field-polarized phase the imaginary part of the dynamical susceptibility $\chi''(\varepsilon, {\bf q})$ is shown to be asymmetric with respect to wavevectors ${\bf q}$ longitudinal to the applied magnetic field ${\bf H}$, which is a hallmark of chiral magnetism. In the helimagnetic phase, $\chi''(\varepsilon, {\bf q})$ becomes increasingly symmetric with decreasing ${\bf H}$ due to the formation of helimagnon bands and the activation of additional spinflip and non-spinflip scattering channels. The neutron spectra are in excellent quantitative agreement with the low-energy theory of cubic chiral magnets with a single fitting parameter being the damping rate of spin waves.Comment: Paper: 10 pages, 5 figures Supplement: 8 pages, 11 figure

Stress and productivity patterns of interrupted, synergistic, and antagonistic office activities.

We describe a controlled experiment, aiming to study productivity and stress effects of email interruptions and activity interactions in the modern office. The measurement set includes multimodal data for n = 63 knowledge workers who volunteered for this experiment and were randomly assigned into four groups: (G1/G2) Batch email interruptions with/without exogenous stress. (G3/G4) Continual email interruptions with/without exogenous stress. To provide context, the experiment's email treatments were surrounded by typical office tasks. The captured variables include physiological indicators of stress, measures of report writing quality and keystroke dynamics, as well as psychometric scores and biographic information detailing participants' profiles. Investigations powered by this dataset are expected to lead to personalized recommendations for handling email interruptions and a deeper understanding of synergistic and antagonistic office activities. Given the centrality of email in the modern office, and the importance of office work to people's lives and the economy, the present data have a valuable role to play

A grid-based infrastructure for distributed retrieval

In large-scale distributed retrieval, challenges of latency, heterogeneity, and dynamicity emphasise the importance of infrastructural support in reducing the development costs of state-of-the-art solutions. We present a service-based infrastructure for distributed retrieval which blends middleware facilities and a design framework to ‘lift’ the resource sharing approach and the computational services of a European Grid platform into the domain of e-Science applications. In this paper, we give an overview of the DILIGENT Search Framework and illustrate its exploitation in the field of Earth Science

Using Reference Manager

This is a handout to describe how to use Reference Manager v12. It is focused on the BioMedical area and covers linking to PubMed, Web of Knowledge, other biblographic providers (OVID and EBSCO) and searching for book information. The notes include how to use Word 2003 and Word 2007/2010 . You must be running v12.0.3 or later for Reference Manager to work with Word 2010