Strategy Selection for Product Service Systems Using Case-based Reasoning

A product service system integrates products and services in order to lower environmental impact. It can achieve good eco-efficiency and has received increase in the last decade. This study focuses on strategy selection for product service system design. Case-based reasoning is utilized to provide suggestions for finding an appropriate strategy. To build a case database, successful PSS cases from the literature and websites were collected and formulated. Twelve indices under three categories were analyzed and selected to describe cases. A lot of successful PSS cases and their information were collected. Forty seven cases were used in this study because of the completeness of information. The analytic hierarchic process is used to find the relative weights of the factors that relate to the selection of customers. These weights are used in calculating the similarity in the case-based reasoning process. The successful strategy of the most similar case is extracted and recommended for PSS strategy determination. More than 90% of tested cases obtained an appropriate strategy from the most similar case. Finally, two new products are introduced to find the best strategy for product service system design and development using the proposed case-based reasoning system

Diagnosis and surgical treatment of multiple endocrine neoplasia type 2A

BACKGROUND: This study aims to introduce the diagnosis and surgical treatment of the rare disease multiple endocrine neoplasia type 2A (MEN 2A). METHODS: Thirteen cases of MEN 2A were diagnosed as medullary thyroid carcinoma (MTC) and pheochromocytoma by biochemical tests and imaging examination. They were treated by bilateral adrenal tumor excision or laparoscopic surgery. RESULTS: Nine patients were treated by bilateral adrenal tumor excision and the remaining four were treated by laparoscopic surgery for pheochromocytoma. Ten patients were treated by total thyroidectomy and bilateral lymph nodes dissection and the remaining three were treated by unilateral thyroidectomy for MTC. Up to now, three patients have died of MTC distant metastasis. CONCLUSIONS: We confirmed that MEN 2A can be diagnosed by biochemical tests and imaging examination when genetic testing is not available. Surgical excision is the predominant way to treat MEN 2A; pheochromocytoma should be excised at first when pheochromocytoma and MTC occur simultaneously

An appendix adenocarcinoma mimicking appendicitis

SummaryCancer of the appendix is very rare and is typically found incidentally in approximately 1% of patients who received appendectomies. Most of appendiceal tumors are carcinoid, adenoma, and lymphoma. Adenocarcinoma of the appendix accounts for only 10% of all primary appendiceal cancers and the treatment remains controversial. In this article, we report a 67-year-old man who presented with symptoms of appendicitis that was diagnosed as adenocarcinoma of the appendix Stage II. The patient was treated with right hemicolectomy. To date he remains asymptomatic

A stable gene selection in microarray data analysis

BACKGROUND: Microarray data analysis is notorious for involving a huge number of genes compared to a relatively small number of samples. Gene selection is to detect the most significantly differentially expressed genes under different conditions, and it has been a central research focus. In general, a better gene selection method can improve the performance of classification significantly. One of the difficulties in gene selection is that the numbers of samples under different conditions vary a lot. RESULTS: Two novel gene selection methods are proposed in this paper, which are not affected by the unbalanced sample class sizes and do not assume any explicit statistical model on the gene expression values. They were evaluated on eight publicly available microarray datasets, using leave-one-out cross-validation and 5-fold cross-validation. The performance is measured by the classification accuracies using the top ranked genes based on the training datasets. CONCLUSION: The experimental results showed that the proposed gene selection methods are efficient, effective, and robust in identifying differentially expressed genes. Adopting the existing SVM-based and KNN-based classifiers, the selected genes by our proposed methods in general give more accurate classification results, typically when the sample class sizes in the training dataset are unbalanced

Investor Attention and Crowdfunding Performance

Today's digital era facilitates the rise of crowdfunding markets by allowing entrepreneurs to seek funding directly from crowds. Crowdfunding, as IT-enabled disintermediation, lowers entry barriers for crowds to invest in business projects and entrepreneurs to obtain funding, yet may exacerbate information asymmetry and absorb investor attention to process information about the potential projects. We develop a model wherein investors with limited attention aggregate personalized information about (reward-based) crowdfunding projects and conduct comparative analyses on how rises in investors’ unit attention cost (associated with greater distractions) affect investor attention, investment decisions, and crowdfunding performance. We then exploit a novel measure of distraction---news pressure---to test the effects of distraction on investor engagement and crowdfunding performance empirically, and the results support our model predictions