A Comparative Study of Employees’ Perception Relating to Performance Appraisal Practices in the Public and Private Banking Sector of Sindh

Performance appraisal is a key human resource practice and source of a motivation for an employee and its success depends on justice perception of an employee towards performance appraisal system. Pakistani banking sector is playing a vital role in the economic growth of the country. Private Banks are innovative and effective in their approach as compared to the public banks. Past studies have compared the public and private banks and found that new private banks are more effective than public banks in terms of technical and economic efficiency. However, there are meager studies available in the context of justice perception of performance appraisal practices in the public and private banks. Data were collected through five-point Likert scale and analyzed with SPSS 24.0 versions. In the result difference of justice is measured by mean differences and independent sample t-test. However, it is found that employees of private banks perceive greater justice as compared to public banks. This study emphasizes the importance of fairness perception of employees in the context of performance appraisal practices and could be used to better understand the problems associated with appraisal practices in public and private banks.

Automated Detection of Glaucoma from Fundus and Optical Coherence Tomography Images

Medical image analysis can play a substantial role in diagnosis of different medical problems. Glaucoma is an asymptomatic neurological disease. Oculists mostly use fundoscopy or OpticalCoherence-Tomography (O-C-T) to diagnose glaucoma.Fundoscopy can be used to analyse the external stratum of posterior part of the eye whereas, O-C-T imaging technology has the ability to analyse the internal stratums of posterior part of the eye.In this thesis, a Hybrid Computer Aided Diagnosis (H-CAD) system has been proposed that integrates both fundus and O-C-T imaging technologies for reliable diagnosis. Fundus module has a novel combination of hybrid structural and textural features. The system improves the decision making process after analysing a variety of glaucoma conditions. It further consists of two sub modules Hybrid Structural Feature-set (HSF) and Hybrid Texture Feature-set (HTF). HSF module calculates structural changes i.e. Cupto-Disc-Ratio (C-D-R) and classifies a sample using Support-Vector-Machine (S-V-M). HTF module analyses the textural properties of optic nerve head and again using S-V-M, makes a decision. In O-C-T module, C-D-R has been calculated on the base of the inner stratums of the retina. In the Cup Diameter Extraction (C-D-E) method, cup boundary has been marked on the base of Inner-Limiting-Membrane (I-L-M) stratum. The O-C-T module presents a new method to increase the accuracy of I-L-M stratum segmentation. It also introduces a new method to interpolate missing points on the extracted Upper-Surface of I-L-M stratum (?????). In addition, a novel technique to remove outliers from ????? has been applied. In Disc-Diameter-Extraction (D-D-E) process, Retinal-Pigment-Epithelium (R-P-E) stratum termination points have been used to locate disc margin. Earlier to R-P-E stratum segmentation, I-L-M stratum elimination has been done by a new approach to trace and eliminate I-L-M stratum. Finally, precise R-P-E stratum segmentation has been achieved on the base of new Thickness Value approximation technique. Furthermore, a novel standard for cup boundaries identification, on the base of mean value of R-P-E stratum terminations points is offered. A local-dataset of SD-O-C-T and fundus images annotated by four oculists has been used for evaluation of proposed H-CAD system. Each module ofH_CAD system classifies data independently. The final result of H-CAD system is determined based on decision of three diverse modules. The evaluations and results have shown that the final result of H_CAD system is more trustable than its contemporary automated models.