This study determines the value of color mapping of bladder wall thickness for detection of tumor as a component of virtual cystoscopy. Thin axial computerized tomography of the air distended bladder shows promise as a potential screening tool for bladder cancer. The low specificity of color mapped 3D renderings makes...
This paper presents the design and implementation of a 3D Virtual Endoscopy system for facilitating diagnostic and surgical planning phases of endoscopic procedures. The system allows the user to interactively explore the internal surface of a 3D patient-specific anatomical model and to create and update a fly-through trajectory through the...
What lessons could the humid shores of the Caribbean, the freezing heights of the Himalayas, or the farthest reaches of Earth's atmosphere hold for your company or organization? Although those places couldn't be more different, all were the scenes of disastrous outcomes brought on by a weakness to which all...
We have argued that no matter how a multi-divisional organization is designed, it will need to find effective ways to spontaneously and responsively coordinate information and activity across its resulting units. This paper discusses how optimal patterns of such emergent collaboration can be depressed by three key barriers: psychological bias...
How do organizations survive in the face of change? Underlying this question is a rich debate about whether organizations can adapt - and if so how. One perspective, organizational ecology, presents evidence suggesting that most organizations are largely inert and ultimately fail. A second perspective argues that some firms do...
We shall now focus on one of this paper's recurring themes, namely that to develop mindsets and practices in accordance with our propositions "Takes time". This is intended both as a statement of fact and as an exhortation. What we are saying is, first, that it is essential for westerners...
The Balanced Scorecard offers a previously unrecognized benefit: a new way of looking at the traditional organizational structure of cost and profit centers. Every unit, by contributing to effective strategy execution, has the opportunity to support and create profit. This capability has important implications for specifying objectives and evaluating the...
Multi-Sided Platforms MSPs, which bring together two or more interdependent groups of customers, have risen to economic and business prominence in many industries. This paper first lays out a simple micro-founded framework which aims to organize academic and managerial thinking about MSPs. It argues that any MSP performs one or...
Firms can manipulate their stock price by restricting the tradable float. When risk averse investors have differences of opinion and are short-sale constrained, reductions in the float freeze out pessimistic investors, pushing up prices. When the float is released, prices fall. To formally test this idea, the author examines a...
Traditional wisdom teaches that brands win market share by offering a wide variety of products, increasing the chance of appealing to a wider variety of customers. It turns out, however, that consumers like choice—but not too much of it. Presented with too many options, buyers may run to a competitor,...
Is brand management issue faced by a powerful for-profit company such as Toyota the same as those navigated by an international Non-Government Organization NGO such as the Red Cross? Most of the organizations face a similar set of challenging questions as they enter the twenty-first century. How should they respond...
Cell phone use in Europe has long outstripped that in North America. The success of "Texting" in Europe has been explained by the viral nature of the medium, its relatively low pricing, and its large, easily accessible network. But the traction that texting gained within the advertising industry, in the...
It is important to understand the motivating forces behind the decisions of businesses and Civil Society Organizations CSOs to enter collaborations, because they form the cornerstone upon which alliances are built. By motivations, one means the conscious values and explicit purposes that initially drive individuals and organizations to explore the...
The purpose of this paper is to suggest a quantitative method for assessing the temporal changes in the geometry of individual multiple sclerosis MS lesions in follow-up studies of MS patients. The paper concludes that the Quantitative three-dimensional shape analysis can serve as a new tool for monitoring MS lesion...
The more you demonstrate true commitment and honesty, the more people trust you. The better you do your job, the more people respect you. If you are doing your job well by honestly addressing the status quo and having the group design working relationships, that bring out their best. This...
Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging fMRI studies are derived from a time series of Echo-Planar images EPIs. Compared to conventional Magnetic Resonance Images MRIs, EPIs are of relatively poor quality for discerning anatomic features and are often registered with corresponding MRIs to map brain activity to neuroanatomy. In this paper they...
Fast, reliable segmentation of the abdominal aorta from three dimensional ultrasound remains a difficult problem. Standard methods based on local information like thresholding, region growing or active contours fail in separating the arteries from the veins and suffer from the lack of homogeneity of the vessel intensity and from the...
This paper formulates and interprets several registration methods in the context of a unified statistical and information theoretic framework. A unified interpretation clarifies the implicit assumptions of each method yielding a better understanding of their relative strengths and weaknesses. Additionally, we discuss a generative statistical model from which we derive...
This paper shows the need for a structured descriptive language that will enable us to bring together multiple sets of volume data, 3D models, anatomical labels or color and transparency information in order to describe the results of surgical planning work that combines multiple sets of data by processing it...
Three-dimensional visualization with virtual endoscopy of the bladder appears to be a promising tool for screening and follow up of cancer. Vining reported a sensitivity of only 23% in detecting tumors smaller then 5mm using virtual cystoscopy. To improve identification of these lesions we developed an algorithm for color mapping...
