Background The risk-adjusted mortality rate (RAMR) is used widely by healthcare agencies to evaluate hospital performance. The RAMR is insensitive to case volume and requires a confidence interval for proper interpretation, which results in a hypothesis testing framework. Unfamiliarity with hypothesis testing can lead to erroneous interpretations by the public and other stakeholders. We argue t...

In this paper, we propose a delay-tolerant secure long-term health care scheme, RCare, for collecting patient’s sensitive personal health information (PHI). Specifically, to minimize the overall health care cost, RCare provides network connectivity to rural areas using conventional transportation vehicles (e.g., cars, buses) as relay nodes. These vehicles are expected to store, carry, and forwa...

Linear Increase/Multiplicative Decrease (LIMD) has typically been the congestion control paradigm of choice in the Internet. However, a major drawback of LIMD is that it reacts identically (and aggressively) to all packet losses, irrespective of the cause of loss. In this paper, we try to augment the basic LIMD congestion control with additional mechanisms to predict the cause of packet losses ...

An increasing number of information systems support their users by helping them in reusing existing knowledge and experience. Often this is done by retrieving similar instances like similar documents, similar process executions or similar persons. While the recommendations use similarity as central concept, the selection of a suitable measure is often done by intuition. This paper introduces a ...

To simplify the problem of atlas selection in multi-atlas segmentation, we define Minimum Reduced Atlas Database (MinRAD), and give an algorithm of selecting MinRAD. Furthermore, nine types of MinRAD model are proposed based different similarity measures and input images, and their performances on multiatlas segmentation are compared in two databases. Finally, we give some advice on how to sele...

The phenomenal increase in network capacity to hundreds and thousands of Gbits/s in the core as well as Gbits/s at the access, is soon to witness stupendous amounts of packets that have to be processed and switched at amplifying line rates. Looking into the future, we address the need for the integration of packets of larger size, called XLFrames (XLFs), into the future Internet framework. This...

In this work we completely characterize how the frequency with which each player participates in the game dynamics affects the possibility of reaching efficient states, i.e., states with an approximation ratio within a constant factor from the price of anarchy, within a polynomially bounded number of best responses. We focus on the well known class of congestion games and we show that, if each ...

This paper proposes a method to recognize scene categories using bags of visual words obtained by hierarchically partitioning into subregion the input images. Specifically, for each subregion the Textons distribution and the extension of the corresponding subregion are taken into account. The bags of visual words computed on the subregions are weighted and used to represent the whole scene. The...

In this paper, we compare the performances of cooperative and distributed spectrum sensing in wireless sensor networks. After introducing the basic problem, we describe two strategies: 1) a cooperative sensing strategy, which takes advantage of cooperation diversity gain to increase probability of detection and 2) a distributed sensing strategy, which by passing the results in an inter-node man...