Lean (also referred to as the Toyota Production System, TPS) is considered to be a radical alternative to the traditional method of mass production and batching principles for maximising operational efficiency, quality, speed and cost. Many hospitals inspired from lean manufacturing to develop their process. They had many improvements in their process. Hospitals reduced their patient waiting times, defects, wastes related to inventory, staff movement and patient transportation by implementing. This study utilizes scientometric and bibliometric tools to analyze visually the literature published in the field of medical lean manufacturing from 2009 to 2023. The relevant articles published from 2009 to 2023 were retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection, VOSviewer and R software were used for bibliometric analysis and visualization. The number of publications related to the research has been increasing year by year before 2021, and then showed a downward trend, including 418 articles from 64 countries and regions, 743 institutions, 198 journals, and 1766 authors. The United States, Italy, and England are the main publishing countries in this research field. The journal “International Journal of Lean Six Sigma” published the most papers (n = 21) about lean manufacturing in medicine, the author with the most publications is Teeling SP, and the most influential author is Improta G. The top three keywords are “Healthcare”, “Quality improvement” and “Management”. This study provides a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of lean manufacturing in medicine, which can help researchers understand the current research hotspots in this field, explore potential research directions, and identify future development trends.
During and after any disaster, a situation report (SITREP) is prepared, based on the Daily Incident Updates (DIU), as an initial decision support information base. It is observed that the decision support system and best practices are not optimized through the available formal reporting on disaster incidents. The rapidly evolving situation, misunderstood terms, inaccurate data and delivery delays of DIU are challenges to the daily SITREP. Multiple stakeholders stipulated with different tasks should be properly understood for the SITREP to initiate relevant response tasks. To fill this research gap, this paper identifies the weaknesses of the current practice and discusses the upgrading of the incident-reporting process using a freely available software tool, enabling further visualization, and producing a comprehensive timely output to share among the stakeholders. In this case, “Power-BI” (a data visualization software) is used as a 360-degree view of useful metrics—in a single place, with real-time updates while being available on all devices for operational decision-making. When a dataset is transformed into several analytical reports and dashboards, it can be easily shared with the target users and action groups. This article analyzed two sources of data, namely the Disaster Management Center (DMC) and the National Disaster Relief Service Center (NDRSC) of Sri Lanka. Senior managers of disaster emergencies were interviewed and explored social media to develop a scheme of best practices for disaster reporting, starting from just before the occurrence, and following the unfolding sequence of the disasters. Using a variety of remotely acquired imageries, rapid mapping, grading, and delineating impacts of natural disasters, were made available to concerned users.
This paper presents an effective method for performing audio steganography, which would help in improving the security of information transmission. Audio steganography is one of the techniques for hiding secret messages within an audio file to maintain communication secrecy from unwanted listeners. Most of these conventional methods have several drawbacks related to distortion, detectability, and inefficiency. To mitigate these issues, a new scheme is presented which combines the techniques of image interpolation with LSB encoding. It selects non-seed pixels to allow reversibility and diminish distortion in medical images. Our technique also embeds a fragile watermarking scheme to identify any breach during transmission to recover data securely and reliably. A magic rectangle has also been used for encryption to enhance data security. This paper proposes a robust, low-distortion audio steganography technique that provides high data integrity with undetectability and will have wide applications in sectors like e-healthcare, corporate data security, and forensic applications. In the future, this approach will be refined for broader audio formats and overall system robustness.
Cardiovascular imaging analysis is a useful tool for the diagnosis, treatment and monitoring of cardiovascular diseases. Imaging techniques allow non-invasive quantitative assessment of cardiac function, providing morphological, functional and dynamic information. Recent technological advances in ultrasound have made it possible to improve the quality of patient treatment, thanks to the use of modern image processing and analysis techniques. However, the acquisition of these dynamic three-dimensional (3D) images leads to the production of large volumes of data to process, from which cardiac structures must be extracted and analyzed during the cardiac cycle. Extraction, three-dimensional visualization, and qualification tools are currently used within the clinical routine, but unfortunately require significant interaction with the physician. These elements justify the development of new efficient and robust algorithms for structure extraction and cardiac motion estimation from three-dimensional images. As a result, making available to clinicians new means to accurately assess cardiac anatomy and function from three-dimensional images represents a definite advance in the investigation of a complete description of the heart from a single examination. The aim of this article is to show what advances have been made in 3D cardiac imaging by ultrasound and additionally to observe which areas have been studied under this imaging modality.
Creative cities as a study discipline have garnered extensive attention and research in theory and practice as a practical approach to urban revitalization and sustainable development. This study conducted a systematic review of academic research on creative cities. Utilizing the visual analysis tools Citespace and VOSviewer, a comprehensive analysis was performed on 570 relevant articles from the Web of Science database. This study analyzed the most influential publications, authors, journals, institutions, and countries within the sample. The investigation spans various disciplinary domains, including geography, environment, culture, and others. Additionally, an exploration of the structure and characteristics of co-cited references was undertaken to enhance our understanding of the theoretical foundations of creative cities research further. Among these, the focal points of the study encompass urban development, urban policies, and the challenges faced. Finally, through co-occurrence analysis of keywords and examining the evolutionary process, the study forecasted that future trends will focus on the practical application of cities to enhance the urban image and improve urban governance from multi-dimensional perspectives such as creativity-related cultural places, public art, and so forth, exploring novel models of creative cities from case to universal. The results of this study can support scholars in grasping the development trends and exploring focal points.
With the increasing call for sustainable development, cities’ demand for green innovation has also been growing. However, relatively little research summarizes the influencing factors of urban green innovation. In this study, we conducted a visual analysis of 1193 research articles on green innovation in cities from the Web of Science core database using bibliometrics and visualization analysis. By analyzing co-occurrence, co-citation, and high-frequency keywords in the literature, we explored the current research status and development trends of influencing factors of urban green innovation and summarized the research in this field. The study found that collaboration among authors and institutions in this field needs to be strengthened to a certain extent. In addition, the study identified the research hotspots and frontiers in the field of urban green innovation, including “management”, “diffusion”, “smart city”, “indicator”, “sustainable city”, “governance”, and “environmental regulation”. Among them, “management”, “governance”, “indicator”, and “internet” are the research frontiers in this field, which are expected to have profound impacts on the future development of urban green innovation. The co-citation analysis results found that China has the highest research output in this field, followed by the United States, England, Australia, and Italy. In conclusion, this study uses CiteSpace software to identify important influencing factors and development trends of urban green innovation. Urban green innovation has gradually become a norm for social and collective behavior in the process of concretization, interdisciplinary development, and technological innovation. These findings have important reference value for promoting research and practice of urban green innovation.
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