Recently, there has been a rapidly growing trend in non-English-speaking countries for English to be adopted as the medium of instruction in higher education. Consequently, it has become necessary to conduct research that will guide lecturers in effectively adopting (EMI) on campus. This paper presents a blended learning strategy that integrates a cloud learning environment (CLE) to give students the opportunity to experience online learning activities. A two-group experiment shows that the use of this CLE-integrated learning strategy can greatly improve students’ learning results, strengthen their professional skills, and increase their motivation. These findings may be attributable to the reduced anxiety among students, increased access to learning resources and sufficient support available under the CLE-integrated learning strategy. Thus, this study confirms the positive effect of CLEs on courses that use EMI.

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are widely used in various applications, such as environmental monitoring, healthcare, event detection, agriculture, disaster management, and so on. Due to their small size, sensors are limited power sources and are often deployed in special environments where frequent battery replacement is not feasible. Therefore, it is important to reduce the energy consumption of sensors and extend the network lifetime. An effective way to achieve this is clustering. This paper proposes a dual cluster-head energy-efficient algorithm (DCK-LEACH), which is based on K-means and Canopy optimization. Considering that the K-means algorithm is sensitive to the location of the initial clustering centers, this paper uses both the dynamic Canopy algorithm and K-means algorithm for clustering. For cluster-head election, this algorithm uses a hierarchy to minimize the cluster-head burden and balance the network load. The primary cluster-head is selected by two objectives: the node’s residual energy and the distance from the node to the clustering center. The vice cluster-head is selected by the residual energy of the node, and the distance from the nodes to the base station. Simulator results show that DCK-LEACH significantly prolongs the energy-critical node lifetime and the network lifetime compared with existing protocols.

Despite the fact that a large number of web applications are used in the medical community, there are still certain technological challenges that need to be addressed, for example, browser plug-ins and efficient 3D visualization. These problems make it necessary for a specific browser plug-in to be preinstalled on the client side when launching applications. Otherwise, the applications fail to run due to the lack of the required software. This paper presents the latest techniques in hypertext markup language 5 (HTML5) and web graphics library (WebGL) for solving these problems and an evaluation of the suitability of the combination of HTML5 and WebGL for the development of web-based medical imaging applications. In this study, a comprehensive medical imaging application was developed using HTML5 and WebGL. This application connects to the medical image server, runs on a standard personal computer (PC), and is easily accessible via a standard web browser. The several functions required for radiological interpretation were implemented, for example, navigation, magnification, windowing, and fly-through. The HTML5-based medical imaging application was tested on major browsers and different operating systems over a local area network (LAN) and a wide area network (WAN). The experimental results revealed that this application successfully performed two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) functions on different PCs over the LAN and WAN. Moreover, it demonstrated an excellent performance for remote access users, especially over a short time period for 3D visualization and a real-time fly-through navigation. The results of the study demonstrate that HTML5 and WebGL combination is suitable for the development of medical imaging applications. Moreover, the advantages and limitations of these technologies are discussed in this paper.

Journal of Medical Internet Research - International Scientific Journal for Medical Research, Information and Communication on the Internet #Preprint #PeerReviewMe: Warning: This is a unreviewed preprint. Readers are warned that the document has not been peer-reviewed by expert/patient reviewers or an academic editor, may contain misleading claims, and is likely to undergo changes before final publication, if accepted, or may have been rejected/withdrawn. Readers with interest and expertise are encouraged to sign up as peer-reviewer, if the paper is within an open peer-review period. Please cite this preprint only for review purposes or for grant applications and CVs (if you are the author). Background: Internet technologies can create advanced and rich web-based apps that allow radiologists to easily access teleradiology systems and remotely view medical images. However, each technology has its own drawbacks. It is difficult to balance the advantages and disadvantages of these internet technologies and identify an optimal solution for the development of medical imaging apps. Objective: This study aimed to compare different internet platform technologies for remotely viewing radiological images and analyze their advantages and disadvantages. Methods: Oracle Java, Adobe Flash, and HTML5 were each used to develop a comprehensive web-based medical imaging app that connected to a medical image server and provided several required functions for radiological interpretation (eg, navigation, magnification, windowing, and fly-through). Java-, Flash-, and HTML5-based medical imaging apps were tested on different operating systems over a local area network and a wide area network. Three computed tomography colonography data sets and 2 ordinary personal computers were used in the experiment. Results: The experimental results demonstrated that Java-, Flash-, and HTML5-based apps had the ability to provide real-time 2D functions. However, for 3D, performances differed between the 3 apps. The Java-based app had the highest frame rate of volume rendering. However, it required the longest time for surface rendering and failed to run surface rendering in macOS. The HTML5-based app had the fastest surface rendering and the highest speed for fly-through without platform dependence. Volume rendering, surface rendering, and fly-through performances of the Flash-based app were significantly worse than those of the other 2 apps. Conclusions: Oracle Java, Adobe Flash, and HTML5 have individual strengths in the development of remote access medical imaging apps. However, HTML5 is a promising technology for remote viewing of radiological images and can provide excellent performance without requiring any plug-ins.

Instructional videos are often a key component of online learning, and their quality significantly influences online learning outcomes and student satisfaction. However, instructional video evaluation is time-consuming. To solve this problem, this study developed an automatic evaluation method for instructional videos. This method first establishes a metric to evaluate instructional videos based on two aspects: video features and watching experience. An automatic scoring method for each indicator was developed based on video and clickstream data. Finally, all the scores were input into the evaluation model to obtain the evaluation result. Our experimental results showed that 85% of the evaluation results using our proposed model are consistent with manual quality evaluation. Therefore, our method can perform automatic evaluation of instructional videos while achieving acceptable accuracy, which is helpful in reducing the workload associated with manual evaluation and improving the quality of online teaching.