THERMAL IMAGING OF ERTA 'ALE LAVA LAKE

The project ''Sviluppo di sistemi di monitoraggio'' (Dipartimento di Protezione Civile di Regione Sicilia, INGV Catania Section, Italy), the Leverhulme Trust, the BBC, and the Ethiopian Air Force

Innovation and Research in Cardiac Surgery: Bioethical Aspects

Significant advancements have been made in Cardiac surgery during the last decades, thanks to technological evolution. The enormous progress achieved has led to a relevant improvement in terms of surgical results, and at the same time, new ethical dilemmas have been addressed. Until the 90’s ethics in cardiac surgery mainly concerned significant moral problems caused by the introduction of extremely innovative techniques. However, today’s ethical issue focuses essentially on the doctor-patient relationship, other aspects of doctor’s practice concern relevant ethical perspectives. Ethics affects today the activity of the surgeon and the doctor in general. It is possible to distinguish clinical ethics, an ethics of health policies, and scientific research ethics. In the following chapter, we try to analyze the main ethical aspects concerning the application of cardiac surgical procedures

Minimally Invasive Ventricular Assist Device Surgery

Heart failure is a growing disease that affects millions of people around the world. Heart transplantation is currently the therapy of choice for these patients. However, the lack of donors has forced the physician to evolve another kind of therapy such as ventricular assist device (VAD) as a bridge to transplant to compensate the lack of organs. Ventricular assist devices are today a successful therapy for the treatment of heart failure; the evolution of these devices and their progressive miniaturization have allowed an evolution of their implantation technique. To date, therefore, in addition to the traditional implant through sternotomy, there are more mini-invasive implant techniques. The purpose of the treaty is to describe these techniques, the implantation sites, and the benefits they can bring to patients

Similarity Measures and Dimensionality Reduction Techniques for Time Series Data Mining

The chapter is organized as follows. Section 2 will introduce the similarity matching problem on time series. We will note the importance of the use of efficient data structures to perform search, and the choice of an adequate distance measure. Section 3 will show some of the most used distance measure for time series data mining. Section 4 will review the above mentioned dimensionality reduction techniques

Thermal imaging of Erta 'Ale active lava lake (Ethiopia)

Active lava lakes represent the uppermost portion of a volume of convective magma exposed to the atmosphere, and provide open windows on magma dynamics within shallow reservoirs. Erta 'Ale volcano located within the Danakil Depression in Ethiopia, hosts one of the few permanent convecting lava lakes, active at least since the last century. We report here the main features of Erta 'Ale lake surface investigated using a handheld infrared thermal camera between 11 and 12 November 2006. In both days, the lake surface was mainly characterized by efficient magma circulation reflecting in the formation of well-marked incandescent cracks and wide crust plates. These crossed the lake from the upwelling to the downwelling margin with mean speeds ranging between 0.01 and 0.15 m s-1. Hot spots opened eventually in the middle of crust plates and/or along cracks. These produced explosive activity lasting commonly between ~10 and 200 s. Apparent temperatures at cracks ranged between ~700 and 1070˚C, and between ~300 and 500˚C at crust plates. Radiative power output of the lake varied between ~45 and 76 MW according to the superficial activity and continuous resurfacing of the lake. Time series analysis of the radiant power output data reveals cyclicity with a period of ~10 min. The combination of visual and thermal observations with apparent mean temperatures and convection rates allows us to interpret these signals as the periodic release of hot overpressured gas bubbles at the lake surface

Seismic Hazard Mapping inside the Project SIGMA

The Project SIGMA (Sistema Integrato di sensori in ambiente cloud per la Gestione Multirischio Avanzata) arises from the fields of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) and advanced applications for the control, monitoring and management of high-risk processes of natural and social origin. SIGMA is a multilevel architecture whose main aim is the acquisition, integration and processing of heterogeneous data from different sources (seismic, volcanic, meteorologic, hydric, pluvial, car traffic, marine traffic, and so on) to manage and elaborate risk mitigation strategies which are important for the emergency management planning. Within the several experimental activities included in the project, there is the designing and realization of a prototype of application platform specialized to provide the operating procedures and software to the public administrations and the industrial companies, for constantly monitoring both the anthropic and natural phenomena in Sicily. In this framework, of course, the seismic risk analysis plays a very important role since Sicily is one of the Italian regions with high seismic risk. Seismic risk assessment may be approached in two different ways: i) as average seismic risk of the buildings and facilities in question during the period considered, combining the vulnerability of different building types and the seismic hazard for the site, which are then expressed in terms of the effects of the events derived from an earthquake catalogue that exceed a specified threshold during a given period; ii) as estimated damage of the buildings and the critical facilities using a scenario input described in terms of the source parameters of the hypocenter as location, magnitude, and so on. Here we deal with the hazard calculation through the code CRISIS (Ordaz, Aguilar and Arboleda) and with the code PROSCEN (PRObabilistic SCENario, [Rotondi and Zonno, 2010]) to obtain earthquake scenario to be used in the latter approach. Indeed, an earthquake scenario is a planning tool that helps decision makers to visualize the specific impact of an earthquake based on the scientific knowledge. An earthquake scenario creates a picture that the members of community can recognize and, at the same time, improves the communication between the scientific, emergency management and policy communities to seismic risk reduction

Towards an automatic monitoring system of infrasonic events at Mt. Etna: strategies for source location and modelling

Active volcanoes characterized by open conduit conditions generate sonic and infrasonic signals, whose investigation provides useful information for both monitoring purposes and studying the dynamics of explosive processes. In this work, we discuss the automatic procedures implemented for a real-time application to the data acquired by a permanent network of five infrasound stations running at Mt. Etna volcano. The infrasound signals at Mt. Etna consist in amplitude transients, called infrasound events. The adopted procedure uses a multi-algorithm approach for event detection, counting, characterization and location. It is designed for an efficient and accurate processing of infrasound records provided by single-site and array stations. Moreover, the source mechanism of these events can be investigated off-line or in near real-time by using three different models: i) Strombolian bubble; ii) resonating conduit and iii) Helmholtz resonator. The infrasound waveforms allow us to choose the most suitable model, to get quantitative information about the source and to follow the time evolution of the source parameters

Concentration and environmental fate of ivermectin in floodplain wetlands: an ecosystem approach

Ivermectin (IVM) is commonly used for broad control of endo- and ecto- parasites in cattle. In wetlands of the Parana Medio River, cattle has been treated repeatedly with IVM for years and concerns have been raised on possible presence of the drug in these ecosystems. A field study was conducted to assess concentration of IVM in two wetlands subjected to different cattle use and frequency of IVM injection. Concentration of IVM in roots of macrophytes, Chironomus sp., Coelotanypus sp., Brachymesia furcata (larvae), Dero sp., Hyalella sp., Hirudinea, Planorbidae, Boana pulchella (larvae), Aphyocharax anisitsi and Serrapinnus calliurus were shown for the first time. Total concentration of IVM in the wetlands, and concentration in cattle manure, sediment, water and macrophytes increased with the number of treated cattle and frequency of IVM injections. Accumulation of IVM in aquatic assemblages is alarming because these organisms fulfill a key role in food webs, constituting a serious risk to human health. Management strategies should be implemented by farmers to keep recently treated animals away from watercourses to reduce the introduction of IVM into aquatic systems.Fil: Mesa, Leticia Mariana. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Santa Fe. Instituto Nacional de Limnología. Universidad Nacional del Litoral. Instituto Nacional de Limnología; ArgentinaFil: Gutiérrez, María Florencia. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Santa Fe. Instituto Nacional de Limnología. Universidad Nacional del Litoral. Instituto Nacional de Limnología; Argentina. Universidad Nacional del Litoral. Facultad de Bioquímica y Ciencias Biológicas; ArgentinaFil: Montalto, Luciana. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Santa Fe. Instituto Nacional de Limnología. Universidad Nacional del Litoral. Instituto Nacional de Limnología; ArgentinaFil: Perez, Vanina Andrea. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Tandil. Centro de Investigación Veterinaria de Tandil. Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires. Centro de Investigación Veterinaria de Tandil. Provincia de Buenos Aires. Gobernación. Comision de Investigaciones Científicas. Centro de Investigación Veterinaria de Tandil; ArgentinaFil: Lifschitz, Adrian Luis. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Tandil. Centro de Investigación Veterinaria de Tandil. Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires. Centro de Investigación Veterinaria de Tandil. Provincia de Buenos Aires. Gobernación. Comision de Investigaciones Científicas. Centro de Investigación Veterinaria de Tandil; Argentin