Improving the Work Breakdown Structure of the Plant Installation - Case: Asphalt Plant

The improvement of the project management forced the industrial organizations to focus on using the project management techniques in their industry, to plan and control the workflow to achieve their targets, further to increase the satisfaction of their customers. One of the most common project management tools are used is the work breakdown structure (WBS), which provide a framework for the implementation of the project scope including project planning, scheduling, monitoring, control, and estimation. Depending on the top-down approach the project activities will be broken into smaller parts that can be measured and controlled during the project implementation. The well-defined construction of the structure contributes to making the project more realistic and visual. However, the misunderstanding of the project WBS among the project team creates deflection and misinterpretation of the project scope. The main issue of this research is to improve the WBS of the installation plan and develop a standard WBS for plant installation. The research was limited to Asphalt plant installation WBS as a case study to identify the weaknesses of the current WBS at the case company which leads to extra installation time and cost. The research is offering a template WBS based on the company logic, defining the frequent risks that affect the plant installation based on the WBS and suggesting a suitable response strategy by recommending a control framework to monitor and control the WBS schedule throughout all installation phases

Contrastive Mixture of Posteriors for Counterfactual Inference, Data Integration and Fairness

Learning meaningful representations of data that can address challenges such as batch effect correction, data integration and counterfactual inference is a central problem in many domains including computational biology. Adopting a Conditional VAE framework, we identify the mathematical principle that unites these challenges: learning a representation that is marginally independent of a condition variable. We therefore propose the Contrastive Mixture of Posteriors (CoMP) method that uses a novel misalignment penalty to enforce this independence. This penalty is defined in terms of mixtures of the variational posteriors themselves, unlike prior work which uses external discrepancy measures such as MMD to ensure independence in latent space. We show that CoMP has attractive theoretical properties compared to previous approaches, especially when there is complex global structure in latent space. We further demonstrate state of the art performance on a number of real-world problems, including the challenging tasks of aligning human tumour samples with cancer cell-lines and performing counterfactual inference on single-cell RNA sequencing data. Incidentally, we find parallels with the fair representation learning literature, and demonstrate CoMP has competitive performance in learning fair yet expressive latent representations

Quantifying microsatellite mutation rates from intestinal stem cell dynamics in Msh2-deficient murine epithelium

Microsatellite sequences have an enhanced susceptibility to mutation and can act as sentinels indicating elevated mutation rates and increased risk of cancer. The probability of mutant fixation within the intestinal epithelium is dictated by a combination of stem cell dynamics and mutation rate. Here we exploit this relationship to infer microsatellite mutation rates. First a sensitive, multiplexed and quantitative method for detecting somatic changes in microsatellite length was developed that allowed the parallel detection of mutant [CA]n sequences from hundreds of low-input tissue samples at up to 14 loci. The method was applied to colonic crypts in Mus musculus and enabled detection of mutant subclones down to 20% of the cellularity of the crypt (around 50 of 250 cells). By quantifying age-related increases in clone frequencies for multiple loci, microsatellite mutation rates in wild-type and Msh2- deficient epithelium were established. An average 388-fold increase in mutation per mitosis rate was observed in Msh2-deficient epithelium (2.4 x10-2) compared to wild- type epithelium (6.2 x10-5)

2015 Update on Acute Adverse Reactions to Gadolinium based Contrast Agents in Cardiovascular MR. Large Multi-National and Multi-Ethnical Population Experience With 37788 Patients From the EuroCMR Registry

Objectives: Specifically we aim to demonstrate that the results of our earlier safety data hold true in this much larger multi-national and multi-ethnical population. Background: We sought to re-evaluate the frequency, manifestations, and severity of acute adverse reactions associated with administration of several gadolinium- based contrast agents during routine CMR on a European level. Methods: Multi-centre, multi-national, and multi-ethnical registry with consecutive enrolment of patients in 57 European centres. Results: During the current observation 37788 doses of Gadolinium based contrast agent were administered to 37788 patients. The mean dose was 24.7 ml (range 5–80 ml), which is equivalent to 0.123 mmol/kg (range 0.01 - 0.3 mmol/kg). Forty-five acute adverse reactions due to contrast administration occurred (0.12 %). Most reactions were classified as mild (43 of 45) according to the American College of Radiology definition. The most frequent complaints following contrast administration were rashes and hives (15 of 45), followed by nausea (10 of 45) and flushes (10 of 45). The event rate ranged from 0.05 % (linear non-ionic agent gadodiamide) to 0.42 % (linear ionic agent gadobenate dimeglumine). Interestingly, we also found different event rates between the three main indications for CMR ranging from 0.05 % (risk stratification in suspected CAD) to 0.22 % (viability in known CAD). Conclusions: The current data indicate that the results of the earlier safety data hold true in this much larger multi-national and multi-ethnical population. Thus, the “off-label” use of Gadolinium based contrast in cardiovascular MR should be regarded as safe concerning the frequency, manifestation and severity of acute events

Email for clinical communication between healthcare professionals

Email is one of the most widely used methods of communication, but its use in healthcare is still uncommon. Where email communication has been utilised in health care, its purposes have included clinical communication between healthcare professionals, but the effects of using email in this way are not well known. We updated a 2012 review of the use of email for two-way clinical communication between healthcare professionals

Observer performance in Computed Tomography head reporting

Aim: To audit the reporting results of a cohort of radiographers (n=6) completing an accredited academic programme in clinical reporting of Computed Tomography (CT) head examinations. Methods: An audit of retrospective academic image case banks and prospective random clinical workload case banks. Both the academic test banks and clinical workload banks included a wide range of normal and abnormal cases of different levels of difficulty and pathology. Abnormalities included: haemorrhage, fractures, lesions, infarctions, degeneration, and normal variants from a variety of referral sources. True positive and negative, as well as false positive and negative fractions were used to mark the reports, which were analysed for accuracy against a reference standard. Further interobserver variability was assessed using Cohens Kappa, one-way analysis of variance and Tukey for multiple comparisons and significance testing at 95% confidence intervals. Results: The mean accuracy score for all radiographers (n=6) and reports (n=3,008) was 90.7% (95%CI 88.3%-93.0%). Mean sensitivity and specificity rate was 86.9% (95%CI 85.8%-88.2%), and 94% (95%CI 89.6%-98.3%) respectively. The most common errors were associated with herniation, lacunar infarctions and subtle fractures (false negatives) and involutional changes, subtle infarctions, and ventricular dilation (false positives). Conclusions: The results suggest appropriately trained radiographers can successfully undertake to report CT head examinations to a high standard. The adoption of both academic and clinical workload image banks that reflect disease examples and the prevalence that may logically be encountered in practice offers the potential for an accurate measure of performance of radiographer’s abilities

Patient Safety in Radiology

AbstractMedical imaging (in short radiology) includes diagnostic and interventional procedures and has an essential role in the diagnosis and treatment of diseases. The objective in this field of medicine is focused on providing diagnostic and therapeutic benefit to the patients along with protecting them from the possible hazards associated with the procedures. By continuously upgrading imaging technologies and improving imaging modalities, such as ultrasound imaging, X-ray-based imaging (radiography, fluoroscopy, and computed tomography), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and interventional radiology, safety has become more and more crucial. The potential hazards in radiology for the patients and the staff are multidimensional and will be discussed in the chapter

The role of human resource management in employees' job satistfaction and organizational commitment

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A szervezeti kultúra és vezetői stílus szervezeti teljesítmény indikátoraira gyakorolt hatása

The objective of this study is to examine the relationship between organizational culture and leadership and their impacts on such organizational performance indicators, organizational commitment and job satisfaction, by reviewing some of the previous organizational culture and leadership literature to clarify the links between both variables and their impacts on performance indicators. One might assume that a better organizational culture along with appropriate leadership style can lead to a higher level of job satisfaction and stronger commitment. Accordingly, if an organization has a strong organizational culture with a suitable leadership style which is able to keep the organization integration, this will result in the strengthening of organizational commitment, job satisfaction, and significant performance enhancement.A tanulmány célja megvizsgálni a szervezeti kultúra és vezetés kapcsolatát, valamint ezek szervezeti teljesítményre - szervezet iránti elkötelezettség, munkával való elégedettség - gyakorolt hatását. Továbbá a korábbi szervezeti kultúra és vezetés szakirodalma alapján tisztázni a változók közötti kapcsolatot és ezek teljesítmény mutatókra gyakorolt hatását. Feltételezhető, hogy egy jobb szervezeti kultúra a megfelelő vezetői stílussal társulva magasabb szintű elégedettséghez és erősebb elkötelezettséghez vezet. Ennek megfelelően, amennyiben a szervezet erős szervezeti kultúrával és alkalmas vezetéssel bír, amely képes megtartani a szervezet integrációját, annak az az eredménye,, hogy erősödik a szervezet iránti elkötelezettség és munkával való elégedettség, és a jelentősen nő a teljesítmény