Brevissima storia dell'ottica

L'ottica è la parte della Fisica che studia la luce e i fenomeni legati alla sua propagazione ed interazione con la materia. Non essendo questo l'ambito per una discussione dei problemi epistemologici connessi all'ottica, discuteremo brevemente i fondamenti storico-sceintifici di questa disciplina ed alcune delle correlazioni fra l'ottica e le altre branche della fisica

La pedagogia ritrovata e rinnovata in una esperienza formativa per il sistema integrato di educazione ed istruzione “zerosei”.

Il contributo illustra un’esperienza formativa triennale a sostegno dello sviluppo del sistema di istruzione e scolarizzazione dei bambini fino a sei anni di cui al decreto legislativo n. 65 del 2017; l’esperienza didattica sull’osservazione pedagogica è stata realizzata nel livornese con la collaborazione dell’Università degli Studi di Firenze. Al corso di formazione hanno partecipato diciotto coordinatori pedagogici e duecentoquaranta educatori e insegnanti degli asili nido comunali e privati e degli asili nido statali, comunali e privati

Le storie dei nonni e delle nonne

That one of the family education programmes is dedicated to grandfathers and grandmothers is the result of the needs expressed both by the parents taking part in the parents’ meetings and by the grandparents themselves, who, as we met them taking and picking up their grandchildren from the nursery and infant school every day, asked for a more structured opportunity to express and exchange their views. For both – parents/children and grandparents/parents – it appears necessary to define the new balances in the network of family bonds, in which the birth of a child can (re)activate more or less hidden dynamics of conflict

GPCALMA: a Grid Approach to Mammographic Screening

The next generation of High Energy Physics experiments requires a GRID approach to a distributed computing system and the associated data management: the key concept is the "Virtual Organisation" (VO), a group of geographycally distributed users with a common goal and the will to share their resources. A similar approach is being applied to a group of Hospitals which joined the GPCALMA project (Grid Platform for Computer Assisted Library for MAmmography), which will allow common screening programs for early diagnosis of breast and, in the future, lung cancer. HEP techniques come into play in writing the application code, which makes use of neural networks for the image analysis and shows performances similar to radiologists in the diagnosis. GRID technologies will allow remote image analysis and interactive online diagnosis, with a relevant reduction of the delays presently associated to screening programs.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures; to appear in the Proceedings of Frontier Detectors For Frontier Physics, 9th Pisa Meeting on Advanced Detectors, 25-31 May 2003, La Biodola, Isola d'Elba, Ital

A scalable Computer-Aided Detection system for microcalcification cluster identification in a pan-European distributed database of mammograms

A computer-aided detection (CADe) system for microcalcification cluster identification in mammograms has been developed in the framework of the EU-founded MammoGrid project. The CADe software is mainly based on wavelet transforms and artificial neural networks. It is able to identify microcalcifications in different kinds of mammograms (i.e. acquired with different machines and settings, digitized with different pitch and bit depth or direct digital ones). The CADe can be remotely run from GRID-connected acquisition and annotation stations, supporting clinicians from geographically distant locations in the interpretation of mammographic data. We report the FROC analyses of the CADe system performances on three different dataset of mammograms, i.e. images of the CALMA INFN-founded database collected in the Italian National screening program, the MIAS database and the so-far collected MammoGrid images. The sensitivity values of 88% at a rate of 2.15 false positive findings per image (FP/im), 88% with 2.18 FP/im and 87% with 5.7 FP/im have been obtained on the CALMA, MIAS and MammoGrid database respectively.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures; Proceedings of the ITBS 2005, 3rd International Conference on Imaging Technologies in Biomedical Sciences, 25-28 September 2005, Milos Island, Greec

An Automatic System to Discriminate Malignant from Benign Massive Lesions on Mammograms

Mammography is widely recognized as the most reliable technique for early detection of breast cancers. Automated or semi-automated computerized classification schemes can be very useful in assisting radiologists with a second opinion about the visual diagnosis of breast lesions, thus leading to a reduction in the number of unnecessary biopsies. We present a computer-aided diagnosis (CADi) system for the characterization of massive lesions in mammograms, whose aim is to distinguish malignant from benign masses. The CADi system we realized is based on a three-stage algorithm: a) a segmentation technique extracts the contours of the massive lesion from the image; b) sixteen features based on size and shape of the lesion are computed; c) a neural classifier merges the features into an estimated likelihood of malignancy. A dataset of 226 massive lesions (109 malignant and 117 benign) has been used in this study. The system performances have been evaluated terms of the receiver-operating characteristic (ROC) analysis, obtaining A_z = 0.80+-0.04 as the estimated area under the ROC curve.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures; Proceedings of the ITBS 2005, 3rd International Conference on Imaging Technologies in Biomedical Sciences, 25-28 September 2005, Milos Island, Greec