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Background In New Zealand, the use of generic medicines is advocated by the Pharmaceutical Management Agency of New Zealand (PHARMAC). Among other interventions, PHARMAC uses educational awareness campaigns to educate pharmacists to promote the uptake of generic medicines. However, the opinion of pharmacists regarding these interventions has not yet been evaluated. Objectives The objective of this study was to explore pharmacists' opinions regarding PHARMAC's interventions in promoting medicine brand changes. Method A cross-sectional study design was employed to explore pharmacists' opinions regarding brand changes. A questionnaire was sent to 500 randomly selected pharmacists in New Zealand. In second component of the study, five community pharmacies in the Auckland region were selected through convenience sampling, and a semi-structured interview was conducted with a pharmacist in each site. Results One-hundred and eighty seven questionnaires were returned and analyzed (response rate of 37.4%). Sixty-eight percent of pharmacists supported brand changes and 98.4% mentioned that PHARMAC is responsible for informing them of brand changes. Over half (51.3%) of pharmacists found the current interventions effective, and 39.6% were satisfied with the current brand change information provided by PHARMAC. The majority (94.7%) of pharmacists currently receive faxed information but many indicated (70.8%) that they prefer email notifications. Cilazapril was considered the least difficult medicine to substitute in the past 10 years and omeprazole the most difficult. Patient acceptance and claims about effectiveness were the main factors in determining the difficulty of brand substitution. Fewer than half of the respondents felt that interventions were implemented with enough preparation time for a brand change. The ideal lead–in time was in the range of three to six months. Pharmacists expressed a number of concerns about brand changes such as the frequency at which they occur and the lack of generic stock availability when a brand change occurs. Conclusion Over one-third of respondents were satisfied with brand change information provided by PHARMAC. Cilazapril was the least difficult medicine to substitute, while omeprazole and salbutamol changes were the most difficult. Claims about effectiveness, quality and side effects were the main factors identified as barriers to generic substitution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: We introduce a novel way to authenticate an image using Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) and Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA) based iris recognition method with reversible watermarking scheme, which is based on Integer Wavelet Transform (IWT) and threshold embedding technique. The parity checks and parity matrix of LDPC encoding and cancellable biometrics i.e., hash string of unique iris code from SHA-512 are embedded into an image for authentication purpose using reversible watermarking scheme based on IWT and threshold embedding technique. Simply by reversing the embedding process, the original image, parity checks, parity matrix and SHA-512 hash are extracted back from watermarked-image. For authentication, the new hash string produced by employing SHA-512 on error corrected iris code from live person is compared with hash string extracted from watermarked-image. The LDPC code reduces the hamming distance for genuine comparisons by a larger amount than for the impostor comparisons. This results in better separation between genuine and impostor users which improves the authentication performance. Security of this scheme is very high due to the security complexity of SHA-512, which is 2256 under birthday attack. Experimental results show that this approach can assure more accurate authentication with a low false rejection or false acceptance rate and outperforms the prior arts in terms of PSNR. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In general, a typical iris recognition based Personal Identification System (PIS) includes iris imaging, iris image quality assessment, fake iris detection, and iris recognition. This paper presents a novel approach, which focusing on iris recognition. The novelty of this approach includes improving the speed and accuracy of the iris segmentation process, fetching the iris image so as to reduce the recognition error, producing a feature vector with discriminating texture features and a proper dimensionality so as to improve the recognition accuracy and computational efficiency. The Canny edge detection and circular Hough transforms are used for the segmentation process. The segmented iris is normalized using Daugman''s rubber sheet model from –[32°,32°] and [148°,212°]. The phase data from 1D Log-Gabor filter is extracted and encoded efficiently to produce a proper feature vector. Experimental tests were performed using CASIAIrisV3 and UBIRIS iris databases. These tests prove that the proposed algorithm has an encouraging performance. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]