Enhancing the Prediction of Lung Cancer Survival Rates Using 2D Features from 3D Scans

Author's accepted manuscript.Available from 18/06/2021.acceptedVersio

In vitro effects of particulate matter associated with a wildland fire in the north-west of Italy

Wildland fires, increasing in recent decades in the Mediterranean region due to climate change, can contribute to PM levels and composition. This study aimed to investigate biological effects of PM2.5 (Ø 10 (Ø 10 and PM2.5 were measured during the fire suggesting that near and distant sites were influenced by fire pollutants. The PM10 and PM2.5 extracts induced a significant mutagenicity in all sites and the mutagenic effect was increased with respect to historical data. All extracts induced a slight increase of the estrogenic activity but a possible antagonistic activity of PM samples collected near fire was observed. No cytotoxicity or DNA damage was detected. Results confirm that fires could be relevant for human health, since they can worsen the air quality increasing PM concentrations, mutagenic and estrogenic effects

Novel Block Diagonalization for Reducing Features and Computations in Medical Diagnosis

Author's accepted manuscript.Available from 28/11/2021.acceptedVersio

The Reference Image Database to Evaluate Response to Therapy in Lung Cancer (RIDER) Project: A Resource for the Development of Change‐Analysis Software

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/110105/1/cptclpt2008161.pd

Amyloid-\u3b225-35, an Amyloid-\u3b21-42 Surrogate, and Proinflammatory Cytokines Stimulate VEGF-A Secretion by Cultured, Early Passage, Normoxic Adult Human Cerebral Astrocytes

Cerebrovascular angiopathy affects late-onset Alzheimer's disease (LOAD) brains by possibly increasing vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF). A expression, thereby stimulating endothelial cell proliferation and migration. Indeed, VEGF-A gene upregulation, with increased VEGF-A protein content of reactive astrocytes and microglia, occurs in LOAD brains, and neovascularization was observed one week after injecting amyloid-\u3b2 (A\u3b2)1-42 into rat hippocampus. We have now found, with cultured 'normoxic' normal adult human astrocytes (NAHAs), that fibrillar A\u3b225-35 (an active A\u3b21-42 fragment) or a cytokine mixture (the (CM)-trio (interleukin [IL]-1\u3b2+interferon [IFN]-\u3b3+tumor necrosis factor [TNF]-\u3b1), or pair (IFN-\u3b3+TNF-\u3b1) like those produced in LOAD brains) stimulates the nuclear translocation of stabilized hypoxia-inducible factor (HIF)-1\u3b1 protein and its binding to VEGF-A hypoxia-response elements; the mRNA synthesis for three VEGF-A splice variants (121, 165, 189); and the secretion of VEGF-A165. The CM-trio was the most powerful stimulus, IFN-\u3b3+TNF-\u3b1 was less potent, and other cytokine pairs or single cytokines or A\u3b235-25 were ineffective. While A\u3b225-35 did not change HIF-1\u3b2 protein levels, the CM-trio increased both HIF-1\u3b1 and HIF-1\u3b2 protein levels, thereby giving an earlier and stronger stimulus to VEGF-A secretion by NAHAs. Thus, increased VEGF-A secretion from astrocytes stimulated by A\u3b21-42 and by microglia-released cytokines might restore angiogenesis and A\u3b21-42 vascular clearance

Case Report: Could Hennebert's Sign Be Evoked Despite Global Vestibular Impairment on Video Head Impulse Test? Considerations Upon Pathomechanisms Underlying Pressure-Induced Nystagmus due to Labyrinthine Fistula

We describe a case series of labyrinthine fistula, characterized by Hennebert's sign (HS) elicited by tragal compression despite global hypofunction of semicircular canals (SCs) on a video-head impulse test (vHIT), and review the relevant literature. All three patients presented with different amounts of cochleo-vestibular loss, consistent with labyrinthitis likely induced by labyrinthine fistula due to different temporal bone pathologies (squamous cell carcinoma involving the external auditory canal in one case and middle ear cholesteatoma in two cases). Despite global hypofunction on vHIT proving impaired function for each SC for high accelerations, all patients developed pressure-induced nystagmus, presumably through spared and/or recovered activity for low-velocity canal afferents. In particular, two patients with isolated horizontal SC fistula developed HS with ipsilesional horizontal nystagmus due to resulting excitatory ampullopetal endolymphatic flows within horizontal canals. Conversely, the last patient with bony erosion involving all SCs developed mainly torsional nystagmus directed contralaterally due to additional inhibitory ampullopetal flows within vertical canals. Moreover, despite impaired measurements on vHIT, we found simultaneous direction-changing positional nystagmus likely due to a buoyancy mechanism within the affected horizontal canal in a case and benign paroxysmal positional vertigo involving the dehiscent posterior canal in another case. Based on our findings, we might suggest a functional dissociation between high (impaired) and low (spared/recovered) accelerations for SCs. Therefore, it could be hypothesized that HS in labyrinthine fistula might be due to the activation of regular ampullary fibers encoding low-velocity inputs, as pressure-induced nystagmus is perfectly aligned with the planes of dehiscent SCs in accordance with Ewald's laws, despite global vestibular impairment on vHIT. Moreover, we showed how pressure-induced nystagmus could present in a rare case of labyrinthine fistulas involving all canals simultaneously. Nevertheless, definite conclusions on the genesis of pressure-induced nystagmus in our patients are prevented due to the lack of objective measurements of both low-acceleration canal responses and otolith function

Preserving Differential Privacy in Convolutional Deep Belief Networks

The remarkable development of deep learning in medicine and healthcare domain presents obvious privacy issues, when deep neural networks are built on users' personal and highly sensitive data, e.g., clinical records, user profiles, biomedical images, etc. However, only a few scientific studies on preserving privacy in deep learning have been conducted. In this paper, we focus on developing a private convolutional deep belief network (pCDBN), which essentially is a convolutional deep belief network (CDBN) under differential privacy. Our main idea of enforcing epsilon-differential privacy is to leverage the functional mechanism to perturb the energy-based objective functions of traditional CDBNs, rather than their results. One key contribution of this work is that we propose the use of Chebyshev expansion to derive the approximate polynomial representation of objective functions. Our theoretical analysis shows that we can further derive the sensitivity and error bounds of the approximate polynomial representation. As a result, preserving differential privacy in CDBNs is feasible. We applied our model in a health social network, i.e., YesiWell data, and in a handwriting digit dataset, i.e., MNIST data, for human behavior prediction, human behavior classification, and handwriting digit recognition tasks. Theoretical analysis and rigorous experimental evaluations show that the pCDBN is highly effective. It significantly outperforms existing solutions