Preliminary study for small animal preclinical hadrontherapy facility

Aim of this work is the study of the preliminary steps to perform a particle treatment of cancer cells inoculated in small animals and to realize a preclinical hadrontherapy facility. A well-defined dosimetric protocol was developed to explicate the steps needed in order to perform a precise proton irradiation in small animals and achieve a highly conformal dose into the target. A precise homemade positioning and holding system for small animals was designed and developed at INFN-LNS in Catania (Italy), where an accurate Monte Carlo simulation was developed, using Geant4 code to simulate the treatment in order to choose the best animal position and perform accurately all the necessary dosimetric evaluations. The Geant4 application can also be used to realize dosimetric studies and its peculiarity consists in the possibility to introduce the real target composition in the simulation using the DICOM micro-CT image. This application was fully validated comparing the results with the experimental measurements. The latter ones were performed at the CATANA (Centro di AdroTerapia e Applicazioni Nucleari Avanzate) facility at INFN-LNS by irradiating both PMMA and water solid phantom. Dosimetric measurements were performed using previously calibrated EBT3 Gafchromic films as a detector and the results were compared with the Geant4 simulation ones. In particular, two different types of dosimetric studies were performed: the first one involved irradiation of a phantom made up of water solid slabs where a layer of EBT3 was alternated with two different slabs in a sandwich configuration, in order to validate the dosimetric distribution. The second one involved irradiation of a PMMA phantom made up of a half hemisphere and some PMMA slabs in order to simulate a subcutaneous tumour configuration, normally used in preclinical studies. In order to evaluate the accordance between experimental and simulation results, two different statistical tests were made: Kolmogorov test and gamma index test. This work represents the first step towards the realization of a preclinical hadrontherapy facility at INFN-LNS in Catania for the future in vivo studies

Nurses’ Attitudes and Practices towards Inpatient Aggression in a Palestinian Mental Health Hospital

Background: Inpatient aggression can occur for many reasons and there are many factors that contribute to this occurrence such as patient factors, staff factors and environmental factors. There are strategies to prevent and manage aggression. Aims: The aims of this study are to explore nurse's practices and attitudes of inpatient psychiatric aggression to identify the way the nurses handle aggression by patients and exploring the effects of patients, staff and environmental factors on the occurrence of aggression. Participants and methods: The study was conducted at a Mental Health Hospital in Palestine. All nursing staff in the mental health hospital who had worked for at least one year at the time of the study was recruited (67 nurses). The participants ranged in age from 20-50 years with a mean age of (35.1) (±SD = ±7.8) and included 30 females and 37 males. A questionnaire was used which has three scales: Attitude Toward Aggression Scale (ATAS), Management Of Aggression and Violence Scale (MAVAS) and Demographic Scale.Results: Nurses were inclined to perceive patient aggression as destructive, violent, intrusive and functional reactions. They were less inclined to view aggression as protective, communicative or acceptable normal reactions. Female nurses in this study were more likely to view aggression as having an intrusive role whereas, on the contrary, male nurses were more likely to view aggression as having a communicative role and they believed that the aggression could be managed in general. Longer professional experience was significantly associated with a higher frequency of the management of aggression in general. Nurses from the admission ward (male and female) were in less agreement with the Protective and Communicative Attitudes scales than the nurses from the other inpatient wards. On the other hand, nurses from admission ward (particularly female) and recovery ward (male and female) had a higher rate of violent and offensive reaction to aggression than nurses from the other wards. The nurses from the chronic female ward had a higher intrusive scale than nurses from the other wards. The highest level of the scientific grade group is a Master of Mental Health with a high level mean regarding the attitudes to the acceptable normal reaction scale, violent reaction scale, functional reaction scale, offensive scale, communicative scale, destructive scale, external causative factors scale, situational/interactional causative factors scale, Management: general, and Management: use of medication. The nurses agree that there are internal, external and interactional factors to inpatient aggression. Nurses believe that patients may be aggressive because of the environment of the psychiatric hospital. Nurses believe that aggression develops because staff does not listen to the patients, there is poor interaction between staff and patients and other people make patients aggressive. Nurses believe in the use of medications, restraint and seclusion widely, on the contrary, they believe in the use of non-physical methods like negotiation and expression of anger. Conclusion: This study demonstrates that there are different attitudes of nurses toward patient aggression in psychiatric inpatient settings. This study found that aggression is negatively viewed by Palestinian psychiatric nurses. These attitudes are reflective of the opinions of lay persons in our society. There is a need for training programs to reorient the opinions of nurses in relation to inpatient aggression. These programs should contribute to improved patient care and reduction in the frequency of aggressive acts within inpatient units. Keywords: Aggression; mental health, nurses; ATAS; MAVAS

Towards preserving word order importance through Forced Invalidation

Large pre-trained language models such as BERT have been widely used as a framework for natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. However, recent findings have revealed that pre-trained language models are insensitive to word order. The performance on NLU tasks remains unchanged even after randomly permuting the word of a sentence, where crucial syntactic information is destroyed. To help preserve the importance of word order, we propose a simple approach called FORCED INVALIDATION (FI): forcing the model to identify permuted sequences as invalid samples. We perform an extensive evaluation of our approach on various English NLU and QA based tasks over BERT-based and attention-based models over word embeddings. Our experiments demonstrate that FI significantly improves the sensitivity of the models to word order

Towards preserving word order importance through Forced Invalidation

Large pre-trained language models such as BERT have been widely used as a framework for natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. However, recent findings have revealed that pre-trained language models are insensitive to word order. The performance on NLU tasks remains unchanged even after randomly permuting the word of a sentence, where crucial syntactic information is destroyed. To help preserve the importance of word order, we propose a simple approach called Forced Invalidation (FI): forcing the model to identify permuted sequences as invalid samples. We perform an extensive evaluation of our approach on various English NLU and QA based tasks over BERT-based and attention-based models over word embeddings. Our experiments demonstrate that Forced Invalidation significantly improves the sensitivity of the models to word order.Comment: EACL 202

Association between Autism Spectrum Disorder and Iron Deficiency in Children Diagnosed Autism Spectrum Disorder in the Northern West Bank

Iron has an important role in cognitive, behavioral, and motor development. A high prevalence of iron deficiency (ID) has been reported in people with autism. Children with autism are at risk for ID and this condition may increase the severity of psychomotor and behavioral problems, some of which already inherently exist in these children. Aim of the study: The aim of this study is to investigate the association between autism and iron deficiency in autistic children in the Northern West Bank and to identify food selectivity and compare indices of food selectivity among children with autism, children with mental disorders and typically developing children (normal children).Background: Autism is a developmental disorder characterized by qualitative abnormalities of social interaction, impairments in communication, and unusual forms of repetitive behavior . Research shows that a high prevalence of iron deficiency has been reported in children with autism spectrum disorders. Inadequate dietary iron intake was considered as a cause of iron deficiency, and low iron intake was thought to be associated with food selectivity which is commonly seen in children with autistic disorders. Method: 90 children with an age range of 3 to 13 years participated in a case control study distributed into study group and two control groups. Thirty children diagnosed with autism according to DSMIV and ICD-10 criteria served as a study group, 30 children with mental disorders other than autism served as a control group, and 30 typically developing children taken from the public functioned as a second control group. The three groups were matched for age, gender and geographical area. Serum ferritin, hemoglobin, hematocrit, mean corpuscular volume, and red cell distribution width values were measured and analyzed with food habit survey and demographic data. Results: ID was detected in 20% (N = 6/30) of autistic children based on Serum ferritin level (SF< 10μ/l), compared with 0% for the two control groups (p= 0.0001). Anemia was defined as hemoglobin <110g/l for children under the age of 6 years and hemoglobin <120g/l for children between 6 and 13 years of age .When analysis done for HGB to these six children (children who have low serum ferritin); it was found that 66.6% (4/6) of the children two were pre-school male children (HGB is less than 110g/1), and the other two were one male and one female of school children (HGB is less than 120g/l) have iron deficiency anemia, and the iron deficiency anemia was 13.3% (4\30) for all autistic group. The results indicated that these differences were for males. It was found also that the frequency of low iron intake in these children was associated with feeding difficulties and food selectivity; there was a significant difference between children in the autistic group who chose foods with a red color as a favorite 23% (7/30) compared to the other two control groups: 0%, respectively (p= 0.0001). The results demonstrated also a significant difference in the frequency of snacks per day (≥ 4) in autistic children 40% (12/30) compared to both mental disorder 16.7 % (n = 5/30) (p = 0.006) and typically developing children 6.7% (n = 2/30) groups (p = 0.001).Conclusions: Results of this study indicated that there is an association between autism, iron deficiency and anemia. Low levels of serum ferritin in autistic children might be a sign of iron deficiency and an early precursor of iron deficiency anemia. These findings suggest that food selectivity is more common in children with autism than in typically developing children. These findings suggest that ferritin levels should be measured in children with autism as a part of routine investigation. Keywords: Child, Autism, Mental disorder, typically developing children, Iron deficiency, Iron deficiency anemia, Ferritin

Reduction of ILP search space with bottom-up propositionalisation

This paper introduces a method for algorithmic reduction of the search space of an ILP task, omitting the need for explicit language bias. It relies on bottom-up propositionalisation of examples and background knowledge. A proof of concept has been developed for observational learning of stratified normal logic programs

Prognostic role of endocarditis in isolated tricuspid valve surgery. A propensity-weighted study

Objectives: The role of the underlying etiology in isolated tricuspid valve surgery has not been investigated extensively in current literature. Aim of this study was to analyse outcomes of patients undergoing surgery due to endocarditis compared to other pathologies. Methods: The SURTRI study is a multicenter study enrolling adult patients who underwent isolated tricuspid valve surgery (n = 406, 55 ± 16 y.o.; 56% female) at 13 international sites. Propensity weighted analysis was performed to compare groups (IE group n = 107 vs Not-IE group n = 299). Results: No difference was found regarding the 30-day mortality (Group IE: 2.8% vs Group Not-IE = 6.8%; OR = 0.45) and major adverse events. Weighted cumulative incidence of cardiac death was significantly higher for patients with endocarditis (p = 0.01). The composite endpoint of cardiac death and reoperation at 6 years was reduced in the Group IE (63.2 ± 6.8% vs 78.9 ± 3.1%; p = 0.022). Repair strategy resulted in an increased late survival even in IE cases. Conclusions: Data from SURTRI study report acceptable 30-day results but significantly reduced late survival in the setting of endocarditis of the tricuspid valve. Multi-disciplinary approach, repair strategy and earlier treatment may improve outcomes. Keywords: Endocarditis; Isolated tricuspid valve disease; Tricuspid valve

Bat diversity boosts ecosystem services:Evidence from pine processionary moth predation

Highlights•Unveiled new PPM bat predators, emphasizing bats' pest suppression role•Cluttered and open space foragers: bat guilds with high pest consumption potential•Bat abundance, species richness and bat diet richness link with pest consumption.•Diverse bat communities enhance pest consumption, reinforcing biotic resistance.•Niche segregation fosters bat coexistence, enhancing ecosystem stabilityAbstractConiferous forests contribute to the European economy; however, they have experienced a decline since the late 1990s due to an invasive pest known as the pine processionary moth, Thaumetopoea pityocampa. The impacts of this pest are increasingly exacerbated by climate change. Traditional control strategies involving pesticides have had negative effects on public health and the environment. Instead, forest managers seek a more ecological and sustainable approach to management that promotes the natural actions of pest control agents. This study aims to evaluate the role of bats in suppressing pine processionary moths in pine forests and examine how the bat community composition and abundance influence pest consumption. Bats were sampled in the mountainous environment of the Serra da Estrela in central Portugal to collect faecal samples for DNA meta-barcoding analysis. We assessed the relationship between a) bat richness, b) bat relative abundance, c) bat diet richness, and the frequency of pine processionary moth consumption. Our findings indicate that sites with the highest bat species richness and abundance exhibit the highest levels of pine processionary moth consumption. The intensity of pine processionary moth consumption is independent of insect diversity within the site. The highest occurrence of pine processionary moth presence in bat diets is primarily observed in species that forage in cluttered habitats. A typical predator of pine processionary moths among bats is likely to be a forest-dwelling species that specialises in consuming Lepidoptera. These species primarily use short-range echolocation calls, which are relatively inaudible to tympanate moths, suitable for locating prey in cluttered environments, employing a gleaning hunting strategy. Examples include species from the genera Plecotus, Myotis, and Rhinolophus. This study enhances our understanding of the potential pest consumption services provided by bats in pine forests. The insights gained from this research can inform integrated pest management practices in forestry

Quantum to Classical Transition in a Single-Ion Laser

Stimulated emission of photons from a large number of atoms into the mode of a strong light field is the principle mechanism for lasing in "classical" lasers. The onset of lasing is marked by a threshold which can be characterised by a sharp increase in photon flux as a function of external pumping strength. The same is not necessarily true for the fundamental building block of a laser: a single trapped atom interacting with a single optical radiation mode. It has been shown that such a "quantum" laser can exhibit thresholdless lasing in the regime of strong coupling between atom and radiation field. However, although theoretically predicted, a threshold at the single-atom level could not be experimentally observed so far. Here, we demonstrate and characterise a single-atom laser with and without threshold behaviour by changing the strength of atom-light field coupling. We observe the establishment of a laser threshold through the accumulation of photons in the optical mode even for a mean photon number substantially lower than for the classical case. Furthermore, self-quenching occurs for very strong external pumping and constitutes an intrinsic limitation of single-atom lasers. Moreover, we find that the statistical properties of the emitted light can be adjusted for weak external pumping, from the quantum to the classical domain. Our observations mark an important step towards fundamental understanding of laser operation in the few-atom limit including systems based on semiconductor quantum dots or molecules.Comment: 19 pages, 4 figures, 10 pages supplement, accepted by Nature Physic