Smoking-related interstitial lung disease

Cigarette smoking has a clear epidemiological association with lung diseases, characterised by chronic inflammation of both the bronchiolar and the interstitial lung compartments. There are several different smoking-related interstitial lung diseases, mainly desquamative interstitial pneumonia, respiratory bronchiolitis- associated interstitial lung disease and pulmonary Langerhans’ cell histiocytosis.The epidemiology of such diseases is largely unknown, although the prevalence of cigarette smoking, particularly in low-income developing countries, indicates that smoking-induced interstitial lung disorders represent a high burden of disease worldwide. The role of chest high-resolution computed tomography has become increasingly important in differential diagnosis and follow-up. A new entity, the syndrome of combined pulmonary fibrosis and emphysema, emerged as another important smoking-related lung disorder with a poor prognosis, associated with the high prevalence of pulmonary hypertension. At the moment the role of anti-inflammatory and immunosuppressive treatment remains unclear, although in clinical practice most of these patients will receive at least one course of corticosteroid therapy. It is vital to stress the importance of identifying these patients and helping them quit smoking

Management of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.

Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) is a deadly progressive lung disease without an effective standard treatment approach. Because of the complexity and uncertainties of IPF treatment, therapeutic decisions need to be tailored to the individual patient, after discussing the potential benefits and pitfalls. Pirfenidone has been approved for the treatment of IPF in many countries, but is not recommended as a first-choice therapy by current guidelines because of the lack of a definite efficacy. Randomized controlled trials represent a valid choice for patients with IPF, and their completion is important in improving both survival and quality of life

New Physics Effects from e+e−→ffˉe^+e^-\to f\bar f at a Linear Collider: the Role of ALR,μA_{LR, \mu}

We discuss New Physics effects in fermion pair production at LC in the framework of the ``Z-peak subtracted approach'', a theoretical scheme that exploits the experimental measurements at LEP1 and SLC as input parameters. In particular, we discuss the role of the longitudinal polarization asymmetry $A_{LR,\mu}$ which turns out to be a very sensitive probe to New Physics of universal type. The extension of the method to non universal effects is discussed and an application is given in two examples: general contact interactions and low energy gravity models with graviton exchange.Comment: 23 pages, REVTeX, 11 Encapsulated PostScript figures ECFA/DESY Workshop on Linear Collider, Obernai 16-19 October 199

Sudden death in water: Diagnostic challenges

The authors report a case of sudden death in a breath-holding diver and highlight the forensic diagnostic difficulties in opining the cause of sudden death in water. The autopsy showed increased thickness of the left ventricular wall with a distinct pattern of concentric hypertrophy, evident particularly in the subaortic interventricular septum. Histological examination revealed diffuse interstitial fibrosis and associated findings of multifocal myocyte disarray especially evident in the subaortic interventricular septum. The analysis and discussion of this case made it possible to attribute sudden death to a lethal arrhythmia following myocyte disarray and hypoxia caused by breath-holding, the triggering factor of apnea. This case demonstrates the importance of a thorough forensic investigation, particularly in histological terms, in subjects found dead in water, in order to ascertain the real cause of death, which may not be always ascribable to drowning

Sarcoidosis: challenging diagnostic aspects of an old disease.

Over the past few years, there have been substantial advances in our understanding of sarcoidosis immunopathogenesis. Conversely, the etiology of the disease remains obscure for a number of reasons, including heterogeneity of clinical manifestations, often overlapping with other disorders, and insensitive and nonspecific diagnostic tests. While no cause has been definitely confirmed, there is increasing evidence that one or more infectious agents may cause the disease, although the organism may no longer be viable. Here we present 2 cases, in which sarcoidosis preceded tuberculosis and non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Development of new lesions in a patient with chronic/remitting sarcoidosis should be looked at with suspicion and promptly investigated in order to rule out an alternative/concomitant diagnosis. In such cases, tissue confirmation from the most accessible site, and bone marrow biopsy-if lymphoma is in the differential diagnosis-should be performed. In conclusion, we strongly advise that physicians be ready to reconsider the diagnosis of sarcoidosis in the presence of atypical manifestations or persistent/progressive disease despite conventional therapy

Forensic tools for the diagnosis of electrocution death: Case study and literature review

Diagnosis of death by electrocution may be difficult when electric marking is not visible or unclear. Accordingly, the body of a man who appeared to have died from accidental electrocution was carefully forensically analysed. Macroscopic and microscopic analysis of the current mark was carried out using a variable-pressure scanning electron microscope equipped with energy dispersive X-ray microanalyser to highlight skin metallisation, indicating the presence of iron and zinc. The histological findings of electrocution myocardial damage were supported by the results of biochemical analysis which demonstrated the creatine kinase-MB and cardiac troponin I elevation. The effects of electric current flow were also highlighted by perforations of endothelial surface of a pulmonary artery using scanning electron microscope, and all the results were analysed by the main tools suggested in the literature

Approximate Down-Sampling Strategy for Power-Constrained Intelligent Systems

In modern power constrained applications, as with most of those belonging to the Internet-of-Things world, custom hardware supports are ever more commonly adopted to deploy artificial intelligence algorithms. In these operating environments, limiting the power dissipation as much as possible is mandatory, even at the expense of reduced computational accuracy. In this paper we propose a novel prediction method to identify potential predominant features in convolutional layers followed by down-sampling layers, thus reducing the overall number of convolution calculations. This approximation down-sampling strategy has been exploited to design a custom hardware architecture for the inference of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models. The proposed approach has been applied to several benchmark CNN models and we achieved an overall energy saving of up to 70% with an accuracy loss lower than 3%, with respect to baseline designs. Performed experiments demonstrate that, when adopted to infer the Visual Geometry Group-16 (VGG16) network model, the proposed architecture implemented on a Xilinx Z-7045 chip and on the STM 28nm process technology dissipates only 680 and 21.9 mJ/frame, respectively. In both cases, the novel design overcomes several state-of-the-art competitors in terms of energy-accuracy drop product

Measurement of the cross-section of high transverse momentum vector bosons reconstructed as single jets and studies of jet substructure in pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV with the ATLAS detector

This paper presents a measurement of the cross-section for high transverse momentum W and Z bosons produced in pp collisions and decaying to all-hadronic final states. The data used in the analysis were recorded by the ATLAS detector at the CERN Large Hadron Collider at a centre-of-mass energy of s√=7 TeV and correspond to an integrated luminosity of 4.6 fb−1. The measurement is performed by reconstructing the boosted W or Z bosons in single jets. The reconstructed jet mass is used to identify the W and Z bosons, and a jet substructure method based on energy cluster information in the jet centre-of-mass frame is used to suppress the large multi-jet background. The cross-section for events with a hadronically decaying W or Z boson, with transverse momentum pT>320GeV and pseudorapidity |η|<1.9, is measured to be σW+Z=8.5±1.7 pb and is compared to the next-to-leading-order calculations. The selected events are further used to study jet grooming techniques

Measurement of three-jet production cross-sections in pp collisions at 7 TeV centre-of-mass energy using the ATLAS detector

Double-differential three-jet production cross-sections are measured in proton--proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of sqrt(s)=7 TeV using the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider. The measurements are presented as a function of the three-jet mass (mjjj), in bins of the sum of the absolute rapidity separations between the three leading jets (|Y∗|). Invariant masses extending up to 5 TeV are reached for 8<|Y∗|<10. These measurements use a sample of data recorded using the ATLAS detector in 2011, which corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 4.51 fb−1. Jets are identified using the anti-kt algorithm with two different jet radius parameters, R=0.4 and R=0.6. The dominant uncertainty in these measurements comes from the jet energy scale. Next-to-leading-order QCD calculations corrected to account for non-perturbative effects are compared to the measurements. Good agreement is found between the data and the theoretical predictions based on most of the available sets of parton distribution functions, over the full kinematic range, covering almost seven orders of magnitude in the measured cross-section values