Preoperative templating in Total Hip Replacement (THR) is a method to estimate the optimal size and position of the implant. Today, observational (manual) size recognition techniques are still used to find a suitable implant for the patient. Therefore, a digital and automated technique should be developed so that the implant size recognition process can be effectively implemented. For this purp...

The explosion of unstructured data in high performance computing presents a challenge for existing storage architecture and design. We present a combination of hardware and software which addresses the storage needs of our center’s compute cluster. We also demonstrate that at a constant total cost of ownership our proposed solution provides an order of magnitude better performance than the John...

Added demands on natural resources and proposed environmental regulations could potentially have a significant impact on the production and operational costs of information technology (IT). In this paper, we utilize an Economic Input-Output Life-Cycle Assessment (EIO-LCA) framework to model projected changes in the cost structure of a portfolio of IT products due to increased electricity prices...

Die benutzerzentrierte Qualitätssicherung, die mit dem weit verbreiteten TCO-Zertifikat zu einem de facto Standard für die Qualitätssicherung von Büroprodukten führte, wird in Schweden seit 1998 unter dem Namen „UsersAward“ auch für Software-Produkte angewendet. „UsersAward“ verfolgt dabei einen ganzheitlichen Prozessansatz, bei dem die Nutzerzufriedenheit mit Software in den sechs Bereichen Ge...

Loan fraud is a critical factor in the insolvency of financial institutions, so companies make an effort to reduce the loss from fraud by building a model for proactive fraud prediction. However, there are still two critical problems to be resolved for the fraud detection: (1) the lack of cost sensitivity between type I error and type II error in most prediction models, and (2) highly skewed di...

The retail industry is being revolutionized by the movement in consumer perception of shopping exemplified by “Shopping is Theater”. Increasingly, consumers are expecting shopping to be a highly interactive and rewarding experience. This has been driving the need for reduced time to market of newer retailing ideas, and the use of advances in hardware and software technologies to create a richer...

Investments in cost reductions are critical for the long run success of companies that operate in dynamic and stochastic market environments. This paper studies optimal investment in cost reductions as a real option under the assumption that a single firm faces two different sources of risk, stochastic demand and input prices. We derive optimal investment strategies for a monopoly as well as a ...

A partial occlusion of one or more of the coronary arteries due to atherosclerosis leads to an insufficient supply of blood to the myocardium and as a result to the reduction of its functioning (myocardial ischemia). A total occlusion blocks the blood supply completely, which generally leads to starvation of myocardial tissue (myocardial infarction). Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has proven ...

We estimate implied cost of equity capital (re) for a sample of firms from 1984 to 1998 using the Ohlson and Juettner (2000) model that does not make restrictive assumptions about clean surplus and payout policies. We find that re is strongly positively associated with conventional risk factors such as earnings variability, systematic and unsystematic return volatility, and leverage, and is neg...

BACKGROUND Prospective, population-based study of an 8-year follow up. To determine the direct cost of diabetic retinopathy [DR], evaluating our screening programme and the cost of treating DR, focusing on diabetic macular oedema [DMO] after anti-vascular endothelial growth factor [anti-VEGF] treatment. METHODS A total of 15,396 diabetes mellitus [DM] patients were studied. We determined the ...