Academic literature on the topic 'Isis toolkit'

Introduction:Horizon scanning (HS) is an important tool for guiding health policy formulation and the decision-making process in Brazil. In 2016, the Ministry of Health started to draft Brazilian clinical practice guidelines for transthyretin familial amyloid polyneuropathy (TTR-FAP), which is a rare disease caused by a mutation of the transthyretin gene. An initial HS report was conducted that provided information about new and emerging technologies for TTR-FAP. The HS identified five drugs that were based on two mechanisms of action: transthyretin stabilization (diflunisal, tafamidis, and tolcapone) and gene silencing (ALN-TTR02 and ISIS-TTR-Rx). At that time in Brazil there were no drugs registered for the treatment of TTR-FAP. However, a few months later tafamidis was licensed in Brazil. In early 2017 the manufacturer submitted an application to the National Committee for Health Technology Incorporation (CONITEC), with the aim of incorporating tafamidis into the Brazilian health system. As a result the HS report was updated to support the assessment by CONITEC. This study aims to show how HS is being used to support CONITEC in this issue.Methods:As per the EuroScan toolkit, we performed a reassessment of the technologies included in the initial HS report. We searched clinical trial registers, the websites of pharmaceutical companies, conference proceedings, scientific journals, HS databases, and regulatory websites for further information. The data were synthesized and a reformulated landscape of the technological environment for TTR-FAP therapy was presented to the CONITEC Plenary.Results:The main difference between the initial and final HS output was that tafamidis was approved for use in Brazil, making it the only registered drug for TTR-FAP. Another difference was related to the start of a new clinical trial with diflunisal for TTR-FAP, indicating that this drug could be a potential competitor for tafamidis. It was also possible to add published positive results from a clinical trial with ISIS-TTR-Rx, which were unavailable when the first report was written. Beyond that, it appears that there are two promising gene silencers on the horizon that could represent potential competitors for tafamidis.Conclusions:The analysis of tafamidis for incorporation into the Brazilian health system is ongoing, but HS was able to deliver strategic information that could affect the final recommendation of CONITEC.

With the rapid advancement of technologies and analysis tools in the smart systems, enabling real-time context monitoring of user's living conditions and quality services delivery is increasing. Current studies in this area are focused on developing mobile applications with specific services, based on toolkit that allow developers to obtain context information from sensors. However, there exists a notable lack of ontology able to represent all the necessary context information starting from distributed users, and constantly changing environment. The modeling of user’s domains to represent diverse mobile and IoT devices, and finalizing with the description of user’s composite situations in smart-*(health, home, cities, car, office, etc.) domains. Considering interoperability, reusability, and flexibility, a new context composite situation ontology for smart systems is proposed with better representation of heterogeneous context. The ontology enables to sense, reason, and infer composite situations in various smart domains, prioritizes critical situations and facilitates the delivery of smart mobile service. Proposed ontology is formalized and validated on different smart environments with different user’s situations. Several experiments were carried out with a real-life motivating scenario. Experimental results showed that the proposed approach has reduced queries times and improved flexibility.

<p>The degree of rigidity in the process of IS evaluation and the dependence on a specific method tends to vary among banks, depending on a combination of many factors. This research focuses on I.S. pre-evaluation as socio-technical process. Central to this is the notion of Request for proposals RFP (Business case) and the analytical toolkit of Actor Network Theory (<a title="Latour, 1987 #96" href="file:///G:/macrothink/JMR/JMR201601/Zu'bi%20M.%20F.%20Al-Zu'bi-Understanding%20Formality/8497-30810-2-SM-writer2-new.docx#_ENREF_64">Latour 1987</a>). Specifically this study attempts to highlight on the level of formality/informality played in the evaluation process by the threads of ‘rigidity issues’ that manifested themselves on the journey throughout the ex ante I.S. business cases in the bank. The study contributes to the existing literature in IS evaluation research by drawing using this case study to infer how pre-evaluation practices are being affected by the developing country context of Jordan. Among the several findings drawn from this research, the informal use of intuition was accommodated within the formal process of IS evaluation demonstrated to be the most prominent. The study highlights the importance of informal evaluation that of “gut feeling” and experience of executives which plays a significant role in the IS evaluation process.</p>

Shared clusters represent an excellent platform for the execution of parallel applications given their low price/performance ratio and the presence of cluster infrastructure in many organisations. The focus of recent research efforts are on parallelism management, transport and efficient access to resources, and making clusters easy to use. In this thesis, we examine reliable parallel computing on clusters. The aim of this research is to demonstrate the feasibility of developing an operating system facility providing transport fault tolerance using existing, enhanced and newly built operating system services for supporting parallel applications. In particular, we use existing process duplication and process migration services, and synthesise a group communications facility for use in a transparent checkpointing facility. This research is carried out using the methods of experimental computer science. To provide a foundation for the synthesis of the group communications and checkpointing facilities, we survey and review related work in both fields. For group communications, we examine the V Distributed System, the x-kernel and Psync, the ISIS Toolkit, and Horus. We identify a need for services that consider the placement of processes on computers in the cluster. For Checkpointing, we examine Manetho, KeyKOS, libckpt, and Diskless Checkpointing. We observe the use of remote computer memories for storing checkpoints, and the use of copy-on-write mechanisms to reduce the time to create a checkpoint of a process. We propose a group communications facility providing two sets of services: user-oriented services and system-oriented services. User-oriented services provide transparency and target application. System-oriented services supplement the user-oriented services for supporting other operating systems services and do not provide transparency. Additional flexibility is achieved by providing delivery and ordering semantics independently. An operating system facility providing transparent checkpointing is synthesised using coordinated checkpointing. To ensure a consistent set of checkpoints are generated by the facility, instead of blindly blocking the processes of a parallel application, only non-deterministic events are blocked. This allows the processes of the parallel application to continue execution during the checkpoint operation. Checkpoints are created by adapting process duplication mechanisms, and checkpoint data is transferred to remote computer memories and disk for storage using the mechanisms of process migration. The services of the group communications facility are used to coordinate the checkpoint operation, and to transport checkpoint data to remote computer memories and disk. Both the group communications facility and the checkpointing facility have been implemented in the GENESIS cluster operating system and provide proof-of-concept. GENESIS uses a microkernel and client-server based operating system architecture, and is demonstrated to provide an appropriate environment for the development of these facilities. We design a number of experiments to test the performance of both the group communications facility and checkpointing facility, and to provide proof-of-performance. We present our approach to testing, the challenges raised in testing the facilities, and how we overcome them. For group communications, we examine the performance of a number of delivery semantics. Good speed-ups are observed and system-oriented group communication services are shown to provide significant performance advantages over user-oriented semantics in the presence of packet loss. For checkpointing, we examine the scalability of the facility given different levels of resource usage and a variable number of computers. Low overheads are observed for checkpointing a parallel application. It is made clear by this research that the microkernel and client-server based cluster operating system provide an ideal environment for the development of a high performance group communications facility and a transparent checkpointing facility for generating a platform for reliable parallel computing on clusters.