Automated Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma Detection with Dynamic Gadolinium-Enhanced MR Imaging

[[abstract]]Objectives: The purpose of this research is to develop an automatic medical diagnosis for segmenting nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) with dynamic gadolinium-enhanced MR imaging. Methods: This system is a multistage process, involving motion correction, head mask generation, dynamic MR data quantitative evaluation, rough segmentation, and rough segmentation refinement. Two approaches, a relative signal increase method and a slope method, are proposed for the quantitative evaluation of dynamic MR data. Results: The NPC detection results obtained using the proposed methods had a rating of 85% in match percent compared with these lesions identified by an experienced radiologist. The match percent for the two proposed methods did not have significant differences. However, the computation cost for the slope method was about twelve times faster than the relative signal increase method. Conclusions: The proposed methods can identify the NPC regions quickly and effectively. This system can enhance the performance of clinical diagnosis

A Case Study Using the Analytic Hierarchy Process for IT Outsourcing Decision Making

Decisions related to managing IT resources - which resources to keep in-house and which resources to outsource - are critical to business success. The goal of this paper is to show the usefulness of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) as a decision-making tool for IT sourcing decisions, based on an analysis of factors that recent literature found to be associated with IT sourcing risk. Although the AHP previously has been suggested for IT outsourcing decision making, this study is the first to consider evaluating the risks of offshore outsourcing, rural outsourcing, and in-sourcing IT processes by using the AHP. From the perspective of the expert decision maker, three IT sourcing strategies were evaluated with respect to 58 criteria. The case study example presented in this paper shows the effectiveness of the AHP to support management for this business decision. The authors\u27 results show that a systematic approach to analyzing outsourcing can reduce the uncertainty and risk that is common in such decisions