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The purpose of this paper is to describe innovative machine vision methods that have been employed for the capture and analysis of 3D skin textures; and the resulting potential for assisting with identification of suspicious lesions in the detection of skin cancer.

A machine vision approach has been employed for analysis of 3D skin textures. This involves an innovative application of photometric stereo for the capture of the textures, and a range of methods for analysing and quantifying them, including statistical methods and neural networks.

3D skin texture has been identified as a useful indicator of skin cancer. It can be used to improve realism of virtual skin reconstructions in tele‐dermatology. 3D texture features can also be combined with 2D features to obtain a more robust classifier for improving diagnostic accuracy, thereby assisting with the long‐term goal of implementing computer‐aided diagnostics for skin cancer.

The device developed for capturing 3D skin textures is known as the “Skin Analyser”, and as far as the authors know it is unique in the world in being able to recover 3D textures from pigmented lesions in vivo. There currently exist numerous methods for analysing lesions, including manual inspection (using established heuristics commonly known as ABCD rules), dermoscopy and SIAoscopy. The ability to capture and analyse 3D lesion textures complements these existing techniques and forms a valuable additional indicator for assisting with the early detection of dangerous skin cancers such as melanoma.

This paper seeks to examine empirically from a contingency perspective the influence of business strategy on the relationship between operations strategy and business results.

Analysis is carried out on a sample of 76 Spanish ceramic tile firms. Data on strategies are gathered by means of a postal survey addressed to operations managers and information on firms' results is drawn from secondary sources. Operations strategy is represented by competitive priorities and business strategy is based on Miles and Snow's typology. Relationships are modelled in regression equations including interaction terms in order to test for the existence of a moderating effect.

Existence of a moderating effect of business strategy on the relationship between operations strategy and firms' results is demonstrated. Specifically, in defender firms, the cost and quality priorities influence positively, whereas priorities of delivery and flexibility have a negative effect. No influence of operations strategy on firms' results is observed in analyser or prospector firms.

Limitations of this research include the reduced number of organisations investigated and the fact that all companies belong to a single industry. Also, the fact that strategy variables are based on self‐reporting measures identified by a single respondent.

Practitioners must bear in mind the coherence between operations strategy and business strategy. In this work, details of business and operations strategy fits are given.

The fit between operations strategy and business strategy is studied by focusing on the moderating role of business strategy.

After implementing an internal quality control (IQC) programme, the purpose of this paper is to maintain the requisite analytical performance for clinical laboratory staff, thereby safeguarding patient test results for their intended medical purpose.

The authors address how quality can be maintained and if lost, how it can be regained. The methodology is based on the experience working in clinical laboratory diagnostics and is in accord with both international accreditation requirements and laboratory best practice guidelines.

Monitoring test performance usually involves both prospective and retrospective IQC data analysis. The authors present a number of different approaches together with software tools currently available and emerging, that permit performance monitoring at the level of the individual analyser, across analysers and laboratories (networks). The authors make recommendations on the appropriate response to IQC rule warnings, failures and metrics that indicate analytical control loss, that either precludes further analysis, or signifies deteriorating performance and eventual unsuitability. The authors provide guidance on systematic troubleshooting, to identify undesirable performance and consider risk assessment preventive measures and continuous quality improvement initiatives; e.g., material acceptance procedures, as tools to help regain and maintain analytical control and minimise potential for patient harm.

The authors provide a template for use by laboratory scientific personnel that ensures the optimal monitoring of analytical test performance and response when it changes undesirably.

The proposed template has been designed to meet the International Organisation for Standardisation for medical laboratories ISO15189:2012 requirements and therefore includes the use of External Quality Assessment and patient results data, as an adjunct to IQC data.

The paper describes research designed to improve automatic pre‐coordinate term indexing by applying powerful general‐purpose language analysis techniques to identify term sources in requests, and to generate variant expressions of the concepts involved for document text searching.

Describes the various systems which have been developed for monitoring gaseous emissions from industrial chimney stacks and flues. Compares extractive and non‐extractive systems and outlines the four main types of analyzer used in continuous extractive systems. Gives a detailed description of the cross‐stack method and how it is used to determine carbon monoxide concentration in a typical process gas flue. Concludes that cross stack analyzers can be used to measure a variety of gases and that the adaptability and low maintenance requirements of this technology make it suitable for monitoring a comprehensive range of gaseous pollutants.

Neuron matrices and neuron operators are introduced for the description and analysis of multilayer neuron determined networks with particular reference to the visual analyser neurons. It is assumed that every layer is composed of neurons of only one type. It is shown that the addition and subtraction operations of common matrices are specific cases of neuron matrices. The concept of neuron matrices allows one to construct a model of the peripheral part of the visual analyser on the principle of physiological funnels, to distinguish between convex and non‐convex images. The solution of the six Rosenblatt problems concerning the local detectors of the visual analyser is considered.

This paper reports on an investigation of the integration of symbolic computation and reasoning into highly computerized numerically‐based realtime control systems for complex plant process management. This is the natural next step in an evolving maturation of the use of computers for automated monitoring and control of continuous processes. A particular implementation involving nuclear power plant intelligent monitoring is being developed from which overall principles and specifications can be distilled, ultimately leading to a general methodology that can be applied to other continuous plant processes.

This study examines the relationship between business strategy, management control system (MCS) type and performance. Does the alignment of organisation business strategy and MCS fresult in better performance?

This study draws on the business strategy and MCS type literature to identify business strategies and MCS types. A scoring method was used to identify business strategy types and cluster analysis to identify MCS types from a sample of 80 firms and 621 firm-years of data. Analysis of variance was used analyse the differences.

Four types of MCS were identified and were labelled clan, adhocracy, market and hierarchy. The sample was split into defender, analyser, prospector and reactor strategies. The results showed defender strategies performed better with hierarchy or market type MCSs while prospector strategies performed better with clan or adhocracy MCS types. Analysers performed acceptably with all MCS types.

The results of this study suggest that organisations should align their business strategy with a certain MCS type to achieve good performance. Also, alignment of top management and business strategy is supported as the top management properties differ between the MCS types.

This research contributes to the management control and strategy literature by demonstrating how the alignment between organisation business strategy and organisation-level MCS type determines organisational performance. The results suggest that differing business strategies yield better performance when aligned with the appropriate management controls represented by an MCS type.