Predictive Role Of Body Composition Parameters In Operable Breast Cancer Patients Treated With Neoadjuvant Chemotherapy.

BACKGROUND: Fat tissue is strongly involved in BC tumorigenesis inducing insulin resistance, chronic inflammation and hormonal changes. Computed tomography (CT) imaging instead of body mass index (BMI) gives a reliable measure of skeletal muscle mass and body fat distribution. The impact of body composition parameters (BCPs) on chemosensitivity is still debated. We examined the associations between BCPs and tumor response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NC) in patients treated for operable breast cancer (BC). METHODS: A retrospective review of BC patients treated with NC in Modena Cancer Center between 2005 and 2017 was performed. BCPs, such as subcutaneous fat area (SFA), visceral fat area (VFA), lumbar skeletal muscle index (LSMI) and liver-to-spleen (L/S) ratio were calculated by Advance workstation (General Electric), software ADW server 3.2 or 4.7. BMI and BCPs were correlated with pathological complete response (pCR) and survival outcomes. RESULTS: 407 patients were included in the study: 55% with BMI < 25 and 45% with BMI 65 25. 137 of them had pre-treatment CT scan imagines. Overweight was significantly associated with postmenopausal status and older age. Hormonal receptor positive BC was more frequent in overweight patients (p<0.05). Postmenopausal women had higher VFA, fatty liver disease and obesity compared to premenopausal patients. No association between BMI classes and tumor response was detected. High VFA and liver steatosis were negative predictive factors for pCR (pCR rate: 36% normal VFA vs 20% high VFA, p= 0.048; no steatosis 32% vs steatosis 13%, p=0.056). Neither BMI classes nor BCPs significantly influenced overall survival and relapse-free survival. CONCLUSION: Visceral adiposity as well as steatosis were closely involved in chemosensitivity in BC patients treated with NC. Their measures from clinically acquired CT scans provide significant predictive information that outperform BMI value. More research is required to evaluate the relationship among adiposity site and survival outcomes

Seven HCI Grand Challenges

This article aims to investigate the Grand Challenges which arise in the current and emerging landscape of rapid technological evolution towards more intelligent interactive technologies, coupled with increased and widened societal needs, as well as individual and collective expectations that HCI, as a discipline, is called upon to address. A perspective oriented to humane and social values is adopted, formulating the challenges in terms of the impact of emerging intelligent interactive technologies on human life both at the individual and societal levels. Seven Grand Challenges are identified and presented in this article: Human-Technology Symbiosis; Human-Environment Interactions; Ethics, Privacy and Security; Well-being, Health and Eudaimonia; Accessibility and Universal Access; Learning and Creativity; and Social Organization and Democracy. Although not exhaustive, they summarize the views and research priorities of an international interdisciplinary group of experts, reflecting different scientific perspectives, methodological approaches and application domains. Each identified Grand Challenge is analyzed in terms of: concept and problem definition; main research issues involved and state of the art; and associated emerging requirements

Motor simulation in a memory task: Evidence from rock climbing

IL lavoro tratta della percezione e ricordo di affordance multiple da parte di scalatori esperti e non

When affordances climb into your mind: Advantages of Motor Simulation in a Memory Task Performed by Novice and Expert Rock Climbers.

Does the sight of multiple climbing holds laid along a path activate motor simulation of climbing that path? One way of testing whether multiple affordances and their displacement influence the formation of a motor simulation is to study acquired motor skills. We used a behavioural task in which expert and novice rock climbers were shown three routes: an easy route, a route impossible to climb but perceptually salient, and a difficult route. After a distraction task, they were then given a recall test in which they had to write down the sequence of holds composing each route. We found no difference between experts and novices on the easy and impossible routes, whereas on the difficult route, the performance of experts was better than that of novices. This suggests that seeing a climbing wall activates a motor, embodied simulation, which relies not on perceptual salience, but on motor competence. More importantly, our results show that the capability to form this simulation is modulated by individuals’ motor repertoire and expertise, and that this strongly impacts recall

Cloud4SOA: A Semantic-Interoperability PaaS Solution for Multi-cloud Platform Management and Portability

Cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a novel, rapidly growing segment in the Cloud computing market. However, the diversity and heterogeneity of today's existing PaaS offerings raises several interoperability challenges. This introduces adoption barriers due to the lock-in issues that prevent the portability of data and applications from one PaaS to another, "locking" software developers to the first provider they use. This paper introduces the Cloud4SOA solution, a scalable approach to semantically interconnect heterogeneous PaaS offerings across different Cloud providers that share the same technology. The design of the Cloud4SOA solution, extensively presented in this work, comprises of a set of interlinked collaborating software components and models to provide developers and platform providers with a number of core capabilities: matchmaking, management, monitoring and migration of applications. The paper concludes with the presentation of a proof-of-concept implem entation of the Cloud4SOA system based on real-life business scenarios