Attracting and Retaining Quality Managers: The Critical Factors

Purpose The purpose of this professional paper is to develop options and a plan of action for what it takes to obtain and retain quality hotel management in the Midwest. Typically when we find quality general managers, they don’t want to move to the Midwest and don’t like smaller towns. More specifically, I hope to come up with a plan of action that I can present to my father and his partner to help the company obtain and retain quality general managers

Conceptual Sentiment Analysis Model

Bag-of-words approach is popularly used for Sentiment analysis. It maps the terms in the reviews to term-document vectors and thus disrupts the syntactic structure of sentences in the reviews. Association among the terms or the semantic structure of sentences is also not preserved. This research work focuses on classifying the sentiments by considering the syntactic and semantic structure of the sentences in the review. To improve accuracy, sentiment classifiers based on relative frequency, average frequency and term frequency inverse document frequency were proposed. To handle terms with apostrophe, preprocessing techniques were extended. To focus on opinionated contents, subjectivity extraction was performed at phrase level. Experiments were performed on Pang & Lees, Kaggle’s and UCI’s dataset. Classifiers were also evaluated on the UCI’s Product and Restaurant dataset. Sentiment Classification accuracy improved from 67.9% for a comparable term weighing technique, DeltaTFIDF, up to 77.2% for proposed classifiers. Inception of the proposed concept based approach, subjectivity extraction and extensions to preprocessing techniques, improved the accuracy to 93.9%

A Bibliometric Survey of Smart Wearable in the Health Insurance Industry

Smart wearables help real-time and remote monitoring of health data for effective diagnostic and preventive health care services. Wearable devices have the ability to track and monitor healthcare vitals such as heart rate, physical activities, BMI (Body Mass Index), blood pressure, and keeps an individual notified about the health status. Artificial Intelligence-enabled wearables show an ability to transform the health insurance sector. This would not only enable self-management of individual health but also help them focus from treatments to the preventions of health hazards. With this customer-centric approach to health care, it will enable the insurance companies to track the health behaviour of the individuals. This can perhaps lead to better incentivization models with a lower premium to the health-centric customers. Health insurance companies can have better outreach with these customer-centric products. The area is exceptionally novel and shows potential for the research opportunities. Although the literature shows the presence of few works incepting the application of smart wearables in health insurance, it was found that the works are across sections of the society and extremely limited to regions and boundaries. Thus, a need for Bibliometric survey in the area of Smart Wearables in Health insurance is necessary to track the research trends, progress and scope of the future research. This paper conducts Bibliometric study for “Smart Wearables in Health Insurance Industry” by extracting documents of total 287 from Scopus database using keywords like wearables, health insurance, health care, machine learning and health risk prediction. The study is conducted since the last decade that is 2011-2020 for the research analysis. From the study, it is observed that application of wearables in health insurance are in a nascent stage and there is a scope for researchers, insurance, health care stakeholders to explore the used cases for a better user experience

Thermoformed Containers Based on Starch and Starch/Coffee Waste Biochar Composites

Biodegradable containers support zero-waste initiatives when alternative end-of-life scenarios are available (e.g., composting, bio digestion). Thermoplastic starch (TPS) has emerged as a readily biodegradable and inexpensive biomaterial that can replace traditional plastics in applications such as food service ware and packaging. This study has two aims. First, demonstrate the thermoformability of starch/polycaprolactone (PCL) as a thermoplastic material with varying starch loadings. Second, incorporate biochar as a sustainable filler that can potentially lower the cost and enhance compostability. Biochar is a stable form of carbon produced by thermochemical conversion of organic biomass, such as food waste, and its incorporation into consumer products could promote a circular economy. Thermoformed samples were successfully made with starch contents from 40 to 60 wt.% without biochar. Increasing the amount of starch increased the viscosity of the material, which in turn affected the compression molding (sheet manufacturing) and thermoforming conditions. PCL content reduced the extent of biodegradation in soil burial experiments and increased the strength and elongation at break of the material. A blend of 50:50 starch:PCL was selected for incorporating biochar. Thermoformed containers were manufactured with 10, 20, and 30 wt.% biochar derived from waste coffee grounds. The addition of biochar decreased the elongation at break but did not significantly affect the modulus of elasticity or tensile strength. The results demonstrate the feasibility of using starch and biochar for the manufacturing of thermoformed containers

AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHARMACEUTICAL SCIENCES FORMULATION, DEVELOPMENT AND CHARACTERIZATION OF SUSTAINED RELEASE BILAYERED TABLET OF VALSARTAN AND PIOGLITAZONE HCl

ABSTRACT Valsartan is a drug used to treat high blood pressure and congestive heart failure. Pioglitazone is a drug that reduces the amount of glucose (sugar) in the blood. It is in a class of anti-diabetic drugs called thiazolidinediones that are used in the treatment of type 2 diabetes. The main objectives of sustained release bilayered tablet of Valsartan and Pioglitazone HCl is that antihypertensive and antidiabetic both drugs can be given in one dosage form. It gives sustained release of both drugs upto 12hr and decrease the chances of Myocardial Infraction which is due to Pioglitazone HCl. In the present research the comparative study between HPMC K4M, HPMC K15M & HPMC K100M was performed. Sustained release bilayered tablets were prepared by different concentration of polymers (45%, 55%, 65%). The powder mixture of Valsartan and other ingredients, Pioglitazone HCl and other ingredients were evaluated for various physical properties such as bulk density, tapped density, angle of repose, carr's index and hausner's ratio. The bilayered tablets were evaluated by different parameters such as hardness, friability, weight variation, drug content uniformity, Swelling Index, and In vitro drug release. The optimized formulation (F9) containing 65% HPMC K15M in Valsartan layer and 65% HPMC K100M in Pioglitazone HCl layer shows in vitro drug release upto 12 hrs

Extraosseous Thoracic Foraminal Osteoblastoma: Diagnostic Dilemma and Management with 3 Year Follow-Up

Osteoblastomas are bone forming lesions arising mainly from posterior elements of the vertebra. They are commonly encountered in the cervical and lumbar regions. We present a case of a thoracic osteoblastoma which is extra osseous and is not communicating with any part of the vertebra present intraforaminally. This is a rare presentation of an osteoblastoma. Imaging studies do not accurately diagnose the osteiod lesion. The size of the lesion and cortical erosion seen on the computed tomography scan help in differentiating the osteoid osteoma and osteoblastoma, but they are less sensitive and specific. Thus a histopathology is the investigation of choice to diagnose the osteoblastoma. Early and adequate removal of mass prevents malignant transformation, metastasis, and recurrence. In our case we excised the pars interarticularis unilaterally, removed the osteoid mass intact, and performed unilateral instrumented fusion. There was no recurrence and solid fusion was seen at 3 years follow up

Oxygen-enhanced MRI and radiotherapy in patients with oropharyngeal squamous cell carcinoma

Background and purpose: This study aimed to assess the role of T1 mapping and oxygen-enhanced MRI in patients undergoing radical dose radiotherapy for HPV positive oropharyngeal cancer, which has not yet been examined in an OE-MRI study. Materials and methods: Variable Flip Angle T1 maps were acquired on a 3T MRI scanner while patients (n = 12) breathed air and/or 100 % oxygen, before and after fraction 10 of the planned 30 fractions of chemoradiotherapy (‘visit 1’ and ‘visit 2’, respectively). The analysis aimed to assess to what extent (1) native R1 relates to patient outcome; (2) OE-MRI response relates to patient outcome; (3) changes in mean R1 before and after radiotherapy related to clinical outcome in patients with oropharyngeal squamous cell carcinoma. Results: Due to the radiotherapy being largely successful, the sample sizes of non-responder groups were small, and therefore it was not possible to properly assess the predictive nature of OE-MRI. The tumour R1 increased in some patients while decreasing in others, in a pattern that was overall consistent with the underlying OE-MRI theory and previously reported tumour OE-MRI responses. In addition, we discuss some practical challenges faced when integrating this technique into a clinical trial, with the aim that sharing this is helpful to researchers planning to use OE-MRI in future clinical studies. Conclusion: Altogether, these results suggest that further clinical OE-MRI studies to assess hypoxia and radiotherapy response are worth pursuing, and that there is important work to be done to improve the robustness of the OE-MRI technique in human applications in order for it to be useful as a widespread clinical technique

Variations in concerns reported on the Patient Concerns Inventory (PCI) in head and neck cancer patients from different health settings across the world

Background: The aim was to collate and contrast patient concerns from a range of different head and neck cancer follow-up clinics around the world. Also, we sought to explore the relationship, if any, between responses to the patient concerns inventory (PCI) and overall quality of life (QOL). Methods: Nineteen units participated with intention of including 100 patients per site as close to a consecutive series as possible in order to minimize selection bias. Results: There were 2136 patients with a median total number of PCI items selected of 5 (2-10). “Fear of the cancer returning” (39%) and “dry mouth” (37%) were most common. Twenty-five percent (524) reported less than good QOL. Conclusion: There was considerable variation between units in the number of items selected and in overall QOL, even after allowing for case-mix variables. There was a strong progressive association between the number of PCI items and QOL

Clinically actionable mutation profiles in patients with cancer identified by whole-genome sequencing

Next-generation sequencing (NGS) efforts have established catalogs of mutations relevant to cancer development. However, the clinical utility of this information remains largely unexplored. Here, we present the results of the first eight patients recruited into a clinical whole-genome sequencing (WGS) program in the United Kingdom. We performed PCR-free WGS of fresh frozen tumors and germline DNA at 75× and 30×, respectively, using the HiSeq2500 HTv4. Subtracted tumor VCFs and paired germlines were subjected to comprehensive analysis of coding and noncoding regions, integration of germline with somatically acquired variants, and global mutation signatures and pathway analyses. Results were classified into tiers and presented to a multidisciplinary tumor board. WGS results helped to clarify an uncertain histopathological diagnosis in one case, led to informed or supported prognosis in two cases, leading to de-escalation of therapy in one, and indicated potential treatments in all eight. Overall 26 different tier 1 potentially clinically actionable findings were identified using WGS compared with six SNVs/indels using routine targeted NGS. These initial results demonstrate the potential of WGS to inform future diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment choice in cancer and justify the systematic evaluation of the clinical utility of WGS in larger cohorts of patients with cancer