Multimodal target correction by local bone registration: a PET/CT evaluation

PET/CT guidance for percutaneous interventions allows biopsy of suspicious metabolically active bone lesions even when no morphological correlation is delineable in the CT images. Clinical use of PET/CT guidance with conventional step-by-step technique is time consuming and complicated especially in cases in which the target lesion is not shown in the CT image. Our recently developed multimodal instrument guidance system (IGS) for PET/CT improved this situation. Nevertheless, bone biopsies even with IGS have a trade-off between precision and intervention duration which is proportional to patient and personnel exposure to radiation. As image acquisition and reconstruction of PET may take up to 10 minutes, preferably only one time consuming combined PET/CT acquisition should be needed during an intervention. In case of required additional control images in order to check for possible patient movements/deformations, or to verify the final needle position in the target, only fast CT acquisitions should be performed. However, for precise instrument guidance accounting for patient movement and/or deformation without having a control PET image, it is essential to be able to transfer the position of the target as identified in the original PET/CT to a changed situation as shown in the control CT.

Ecosystem service trade-offs and stakeholder claims - a meso-scale study from a Madagascar biodiversity hotspot

The north-eastern escarpment of Madagascar has been labelled a global biodiversity hotspot due to its extremely high rates of endemic species which are heavily threatened by accelerated deforestation rates and landscape change. The traditional practice of shifting cultivation or "tavy" used by the majority of land users in this area to produce subsistence rice is commonly blamed for these threats. A wide range of stakeholders ranging from conservation to development agencies, and from the private to the public sector has therefore been involved in trying to find solutions to protect the remaining forest fragments and to increase agricultural production. Consequently, provisioning, regulating and socio-cultural services of this forest-mosaic landscape are fundamentally altered leading to trade-offs between them and consequently new winners and losers amongst the stakeholders at different scales. However, despite a growing amount of evidence from case studies analysing local changes, the regional dynamics of the landscape and their contribution to such trade-offs remain poorely understood. This study therefore aims at using generalised landscape units as a base for the assessment of multi-level stakeholder claims on ecosystem services to inform negotiation, planning and decision making at a meso-scale. The presented study applies a mixed-method approach combining remote sensing, GIS and socio-economic methods to reveal current landscape dynamics, their change over time and the corresponding ecosystem service trade-offs induced by diverse stakeholder claims on the regional level. In a first step a new regional land cover classification for three points in time (1995, 2005 and 2011) was conducted including agricultural classes characteristic for shifting cultivation systems. Secondly, a novel GIS approach, termed “landscape mosaics approach” originally developed to assess dynamics of shifting cultivation landscapes in Laos was applied. Through this approach generalised landscape mosaics were generated allowing for a better understanding of changes in land use intensities instead of land cover. As a next step we will try to use these landscape units as proxies to map provisioning and regulating ecosystem services throughout the region. Through the overlay with other regional background data such as accessibility and population density and information from a region-wide stakeholder analysis, multiscale trade-offs between different services will be highlighted. The trade-offs observed on the regional scale will then be validated through a socio-economic ground-truthing within selected sites at the local scale. We propose that such meso-scale knowledge is required by all stakeholders involved in decision making towards sustainable development of north-eastern Madagascar.

Classification of interstitial lung disease patterns using local DCT features and random forest.

Over the last decade, a plethora of computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems have been proposed aiming to improve the accuracy of the physicians in the diagnosis of interstitial lung diseases (ILD). In this study, we propose a scheme for the classification of HRCT image patches with ILD abnormalities as a basic component towards the quantification of the various ILD patterns in the lung. The feature extraction method relies on local spectral analysis using a DCT-based filter bank. After convolving the image with the filter bank, q-quantiles are computed for describing the distribution of local frequencies that characterize image texture. Then, the gray-level histogram values of the original image are added forming the final feature vector. The classification of the already described patches is done by a random forest (RF) classifier. The experimental results prove the superior performance and efficiency of the proposed approach compared against the state-of-the-art.

Service Brand Relationship Quality: Hot or Cold?

Customers’ long-term brand relations are crucial drivers of a service brand’s sustainable competitive advantage. This research empirically examines the quality of customer-service brand relationships in the context of an airline’s frequent flyer program. The authors show that service brand relationship quality (BRQ) involves both a hot (based on emotions) and a cold (based on objectrelevant beliefs) component. They find that these two components have different implications for a service brand’s performance and are at least partially driven by different antecedents whose relative importance changes over time. Specifically, cold BRQ is important for word-of-mouth behavior and is strongly driven by partner quality (i.e., the generalized assessment of the brand in its role as a relationship counterpart). Hot BRQ, on the other hand, has a stronger impact on willingness to pay a price premium and consideration set size. In early stages of a customer-brand relationship hot BRQ is more strongly driven by self-congruence (i.e., consumer’s perception of the fit between his/her self and the brand’s personality), in later stages partner quality becomes more relevant. The authors discuss the implications of their findings for the development of BRQ and the implementation of alternative growth strategies in a services context.

Demo -- Closer to Cloud-RAN: RAN as a Service

Commoditization and virtualization of wireless networks are changing the economics of mobile networks to help network providers (e.g., MNO, MVNO) move from proprietary and bespoke hardware and software platforms toward an open, cost-effective, and flexible cellular ecosystem. In addition, rich and innovative local services can be efficiently created through cloudification by leveraging the existing infrastructure. In this work, we present RANaaS, which is a cloudified radio access network delivered as a service. RANaaS provides the service life-cycle of an ondemand, elastic, and pay as you go 3GPP RAN instantiated on top of the cloud infrastructure. We demonstrate an example of realtime cloudified LTE network deployment using the OpenAirInterface LTE implementation and OpenStack running on commodity hardware as well as the flexibility and performance of the platform developed.

People, protected areas and ecosystem services: a qualitative and quantitative analysis of local people's perception and preferences in Côte d'Ivoire

The long-term integrity of protected areas (PAs), and hence the maintenance of related ecosystem services (ES), are dependent on the support of local people. In the present study, local people's perceptions of ecosystem services from PAs and factors that govern local preferences for PAs are assessed. Fourteen study villages were randomly selected from three different protected forest areas and one control site along the southern coast of Côte d'Ivoire. Data was collected through a mixed-method approach, including qualitative semi-structured interviews and a household survey based on hypothetical choice scenarios. Local people's perceptions of ecosystem service provision was decrypted through qualitative content analysis, while the relation between people's preferences and potential factors that affect preferences were analyzed through multinomial models. This study shows that rural villagers do perceive a number of different ecosystem services as benefits from PAs in Côte d'Ivoire. The results based on quantitative data also suggest that local preferences for PAs and related ecosystem services are driven by PAs' management rules, age, and people's dependence on natural resources.