Colorectal cancer - the prediction of risk

In the year 2000, the UK government implemented the 2 Week Wait (2WW) rule and CRC guidelines to provide primary care (General Practitioners) and secondary care (hospitals) with a method to help streamline and prioritize colorectal referrals.;In spite of the best of intentions, the 2WW system has failed to perform to its expectations. The yield of CRC from the 2WW referral route has been consistently poor in most centres in the UK. The NHS guidelines even if properly implemented have been shown to be insufficiently specific to pick up most CRCs.;Selvachandran et al from Crewe, UK have developed a computer program based Patient Consultation Questionnaire (PCQ) which is easy to complete by the patient, provides a comprehensive history and a significantly improved, reliable and specific cancer risk assessment as compared to NHS guidelines. The Weighted Numerical Score (WNS) or Selva score derived from the PCQ reflects the patient's risk of having CRC. The higher the score, the better is the specificity and positive predictive value for detecting CRC. Our study has validated this questionnaire based cancer risk assessment tool in the large and ethnically diverse population of Leicester. We have shown that the PCQ based WNS improves specificity resulting in improved CRC detection rate in a significantly smaller urgently referred population. We have also assessed patient satisfaction with the use of the PCQ.;CRC presenting as an emergency continues to form a significant proportion of the total number of CRCs diagnosed in any centre. We have shown that these patients differ in their presentation and outcome from the elective patients. Lack of any specific colorectal symptoms may result in a delay in the diagnosis in some of these patients who have proximal colon cancers. Similarly, the incidence and presentation of CRC in the ethnic population differs significantly for that of the native population

Matching IoT Devices to the Fog Service Providers: A Mechanism Design Perspective

In the Internet of Things (IoT) + Fog + Cloud architecture, with the unprecedented growth of IoT devices, one of the challenging issues that needs to be tackled is to allocate Fog service providers (FSPs) to IoT devices, especially in a game-theoretic environment. Here, the issue of allocation of FSPs to the IoT devices is sifted with game-theoretic idea so that utility maximizing agents may be benign. In this scenario, we have multiple IoT devices and multiple FSPs, and the IoT devices give preference ordering over the subset of FSPs. Given such a scenario, the goal is to allocate at most one FSP to each of the IoT devices. We propose mechanisms based on the theory of mechanism design without money to allocate FSPs to the IoT devices. The proposed mechanisms have been designed in a flexible manner to address the long and short duration access of the FSPs to the IoT devices. For analytical results, we have proved the economic robustness, and probabilistic analyses have been carried out for allocation of IoT devices to the FSPs. In simulation, mechanism efficiency is laid out under different scenarios with an implementation in Python