Analysis by data mining in the emergency medicine triage database at a Taiwanese regional hospital

“Emergency medicine” is the front line of medical service a hospital provides; also it is the department people seek medical care from immediately after an emergency happens. The statistics by the Department of Health, Executive Yuan, indicate that over years, the number of people at the emergency department has been increasing. The US has introduced and practiced the triage system in the emergency medicine in 1960, whereby to aid the emergency department in allocating the patients, to give them appropriate medical care by the fast decision of the nurses and doctors in case of the patients’ seriousness through their judgment.This study takes on the knowledge contained in the massive data of unknown characteristics in the triage database at a Taiwanese regional hospital, using the cluster analysis and the rough set theory as tools for data mining to extract, with the analysis software ROSE2 (Rough Sets Data Explorer) and through rule induction technique, the imprecise, uncertain and vague information of rules from the massive database, and builds the model that is capable of simplifying massive data while maintaining the accuracy in classifying rules. After analyzing and evaluating the knowledge obtained from relevant mining in the hospitals past medical data for the consumption of emergency medical resources, this thesis proposes suggestions as reference for the hospitals in subsequent elevation of medical quality and decrease in operative costs.     

A computer-enabled solution procedure for food wholesalers’ distribution decision in cities with a circular transportation infrastructure

This paper addresses the food distribution decision from a wholesaler's perspective, as the wholesalers are often faced with thorny issues such as when, where, how to deliver products at the lowest costs to best satisfy the retailers’ changing needs. This research relies on a distribution problem encountered at Northern Grocery Company in Beijing as an example to develop a two-stage solution procedure and subsequent computer-enabled programs for identifying efficient vehicle routing alternatives. The solution process, which integrates heuristic search algorithms and an integer programming model, can be applied to a wide range of distribution problems with specified route durations and a circular transportation network structure as exemplified by City of Beijing.     

Evaluation of Landsat 8 OLI imagery for unsupervised inland water extraction

The successful launch of the Landsat 8 satellite continues the Earth observation of the Landsat series, which has been taking place for nearly 40 years. With the increase in the band number and the improved spectral range compared with the previous Landsat imagery, it will be possible to expand the application of the new Landsat 8 imagery. The purpose of this study is to explore water extraction based on the new Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) imagery. According to the specific inland water conditions (clear water, turbid water, and eutrophic water), a number of highly adaptable water indices are assessed for water extraction using Landsat OLI imagery. The results show that clear water is the easiest to extract among the different types of waterbodies, with the highest average accuracy of 97%. The highest-accuracy methods are the automated water extraction index for shadow pixels (AWEI_sh), the normalized difference water index using bands 4 and 7 (NDWI₄₇), and the normalized difference water index using bands 3 and 7 (NDWI₃₇), with accuracies of 98.55%, 95.50%, and 96.61%, corresponding to clear water, turbid water, and eutrophic water, respectively. Through the analysis of the different methods for optimal band selection, the seventh band OLI7 (shortwave infrared 2, SWIR-2) of Landsat OLI shows the best performance in water identification. When applying the water indices to water extraction, Otsu’s algorithm has been used to automatically select the water threshold. Using extensive experiments with Otsu’s algorithm and a manual method, it was found that Otsu’s algorithm can replace manual selection and has the ability to select an accurate threshold for water extraction.     

An efficient image encryption algorithm based on a novel chaotic map

Multimedia Tools and Applications - In this paper, we propose a novel low dimensional chaotic map, namely, compounded piecewise linear map (CPLM) in order to balance between security and...     

Reachability determination in acyclic Petri nets by cell enumeration approach

Reachability is one of the most important behavioral properties of Petri nets. We propose in this paper a novel approach for solving the fundamental equation in the reachability analysis of acyclic Petri nets, which has been known to be NP-complete. More specifically, by adopting a revised version of the cell enumeration method for an arrangement of hyperplanes in discrete geometry, we develop an efficient solution scheme to identify firing count vector solution(s) to the fundamental equation on a bounded integer set, with a complexity bound of O((nu)^n−m), where n is the number of transitions, m is the number of places and u is the upper bound of the number of firings for all individual transitions.