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This work follows up a previous paper at conference Cyberworlds 2018 for automatic border approximation of cutaneous melanoma and other skin lesions from macroscopic medical images. Given a set of feature points on the boundary of the skin lesion obtained by a dermatologist, we introduce a new method for automatic least-squares B-spline curve fitting of such feature points. The method is based on the original cuckoo search algorithm used in the conference paper but with three major modifications: (1) we use an enhanced version of the algorithm in which the parameters change dynamically with the generations; (2) this improved method is coupled with the Luus-Jaakola local search heuristics for better performance; (3) the original Bézier curves are now replaced by the more powerful and more general B-spline curves, providing extra flexibility and lower polynomial degree. The new method (called memetic improved cuckoo search algorithm) has been applied to a benchmark comprised of ten medical images of skin lesions. The computer results show that it performs very well and yields a border curve enclosing the lesion and fitting the feature points with good accuracy. Furthermore, a comparison with ten alternative methods in the literature (six standard mathematical methods for B-spline fitting, two state-of-the art methods in medical imaging, the method in our conference paper and the non-memetic version of our new method) shows that it outperforms all these methods in terms of numerical accuracy for the instances in our reference benchmark. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid development of information and communication technologies (ICT) has enabled the prevailing digital transformation (i.e. digitalization), where physical products can be readily digitized in the virtual space and seamlessly interconnected. Meanwhile, industries are ever increasingly adopting service business models (i.e. servitization), so as to offer not only physical products but also services as a solution bundle to meet individual customer needs. Such convergence of both digitalization and servitization (i.e. digital servitization) has triggered an emerging IT-driven business paradigm, smart product-service systems (Smart PSS). As a novel paradigm coined in 2014, to the authors' knowledge, only 2 conference papers have provided some literature review to date, and many issues remain uncovered or not comprehensively investigated. Aiming to fill this gap, this paper has conducted a systematic review of Smart PSS or related papers published ever since its first brought up to date (30/06/2019), and selected 97 representative items together with other 37 supplementary works to summarize the tendency towards Smart PSS, its business and technical aspects, current challenges, and future perspectives. From the survey, it is found that several hybrid concerns are the key challenges faced, and self-adaptiveness with sustainability, advanced IT infrastructure, human-centric perspectives, and circular lifecycle management are the core future perspectives to explore. It is hoped that this work can attract more open discussions and provide useful insights to both academics and industries in their exploration and implementation of Smart PSS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]