Assessing the image quality of pelvic MR images acquired with a flat couch for radiotherapy treatment planning

Objectives: To improve the integration of MRI with radiotherapy treatment planning, our department fabricated a flat couch top for our MR scanner. Setting up using this couch top meant that the patients were physically higher up in the scanner and, posteriorly, a gap was introduced between the patient and radiofrequency coil.

Values based supply chain management and emergent organizational structure

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe an emergent supply chain management system that supports a sustainable values based organization (VBO) using a structuration theory-based framework.

Design/methodology/approach – A case study of a sustainable beef cooperative employing a structuration theory framework provides insights into sustainable supply chain management models.

Findings – The supply chain design and management afford the key to the VBO’s success. In order to attain the necessary price premium, the unique product attributes acquired through the natural beef production process must be sustained along the entire supply chain and communicated to the end customer. Structuration theory is useful in understanding supply chain management in VBOs.
Research limitations/implications – The paper has implications for studying VBOs, particularly those prioritizing sustainability values. The descriptive model presented is useful in settings where organizational structure and the supply chain are needed to support sustainable products and processes and whose success is facilitated by establishing strategic partners, especially those that make possible economies of scale. The study is limited to one, privately owned firm, operating in a specialty industry sector.

Practical implications – The paper has implications for those entities with an identified values set that endows the product with unique characteristics that must be conveyed to their end consumer in order to command a price premium and/or differentiate the product from a commodity. The case study provides an example of how a unique product as well as a facilitating organizational structure and supply chain emerge out of the application of a set of core values.

Originality/value – Little previous research focuses on implications of supply chain management in VBOs. In addition, the paper contributes to both the supply chain management and sustainability literature by relating supply chain management to a more comprehensive sustainability agenda including social, environmental, and long-term economic sustainability and by a theoretically based structuring.

Keywords Sustainable development, Supply chain management, Food industry, Organizational culture, Animal husbandry

Playful structure: a novel image of early years pedagogy for primary school classrooms

Playful structure is a new pedagogic image representing a more balanced and integrated perspective on early years pedagogy, aiming to blend apparent dichotomies and contradictions and to sustain and evolve play-based practice beyond Year 1. Playful structure invites teachers and children to initiate and maintain a degree of playfulness in the child’s whole learning experience, even when the learning intentions demand a supportive structure. Thus, playfulness becomes characteristic of the interaction between adult and the child and not just characteristic of child-initiated versus adult-initiated activities, or of play-time versus task-time. The paper is based on intensive observations and interviews with teachers in Northern Ireland who participated in a play-based and informal curriculum. This paper explains how playful structure rests on complementary processes of infusion of structure into play-based activities and infusion of playfulness into more structured activities, illustrated by cameos. ‘Infusion’ suggests the subtle blending process that allows apparent dichotomies and contradictions to be resolved in practice.

Hybrid image/ray-shooting UHF radio propagation predictor for populated indoor environments

A novel model for indoor wireless communication, based on a dual image and ray-shooting approach, is presented. The model, capable of improved site-specific indoor propagation prediction, considers multiple human bodies moving within the environment. In a modern office at 2.45GHz, the combined effect of pedestrian traffic and a moving receiver causes rapid temporal fading of up to 30dB.

Organizational Change and Employees' Mental Health: The Protective Role of Sense of Coherence

Objective: To examine the impact of sense of coherence (SOC) on psychiatric events in the context of organizational merger. Methods: Data were derived from a prospective

A Robust Co-Localisation Measurement Utilising Z-Stack Image Intensity Similarities for Biological Studies

Background: Co-localisation is a widely used measurement in immunohistochemical analysis to determine if fluorescently labelled biological entities, such as cells, proteins or molecules share a same location. However the measurement of co-localisation is challenging due to the complex nature of such fluorescent images, especially when multiple focal planes are captured. The current state-of-art co-localisation measurements of 3-dimensional (3D) image stacks are biased by noise and cross-overs from non-consecutive planes.

Method: In this study, we have developed Co-localisation Intensity Coefficients (CICs) and Co-localisation Binary Coefficients (CBCs), which uses rich z-stack data from neighbouring focal planes to identify similarities between image intensities of two and potentially more fluorescently-labelled biological entities. This was developed using z-stack images from murine organotypic slice cultures from central nervous system tissue, and two sets of pseudo-data. A large amount of non-specific cross-over situations are excluded using this method. This proposed method is also proven to be robust in recognising co-localisations even when images are polluted with a range of noises.

Results: The proposed CBCs and CICs produce robust co-localisation measurements which are easy to interpret, resilient to noise and capable of removing a large amount of false positivity, such as non-specific cross-overs. Performance of this method of measurement is significantly more accurate than existing measurements, as determined statistically using pseudo datasets of known values. This method provides an important and reliable tool for fluorescent 3D neurobiological studies, and will benefit other biological studies which measure fluorescence co-localisation in 3D.

Image processing chip for small object detection

A new, front-end image processing chip is presented for real-time small object detection. It has been implemented using a 0.6 µ, 3.3 V CMOS technology and operates on 10-bit input data at 54 megasamples per second. It occupies an area of 12.9 mm×13.6 mm (including pads), dissipates 1.5 W, has 92 I/O pins and is to be housed in a 160-pin ceramic quarter flat-pack. It performs both one- and two-dimensional FIR filtering and a multilayer perceptron (MLP) neural network function using a reconfigurable array of 21 multiplication-accumulation cells which corresponds to a window size of 7×3. The chip can cope with images of 2047 pixels per line and can be cascaded to cope with larger window sizes. The chip performs two billion fixed point multiplications and additions per second.