1,436 research outputs found
Very Prolonged Treatment with Albendazole of a Case of Disseminated Abdominal Cystic Echinococcosis
Cystic echinococcosis is a zoonosis caused by the ingestion of food or water contaminated by Echinococcus eggs. E. granulosus is the most common causative agent of cystic echinococcosis that still has a relevant incidence in Italy, especially on the islands of Sicily and Sardinia. We report the case of a 64-year-old man with disseminated abdominal cystic echinococcosis (liver, spleen, peritoneum). The patient was asymptomatic and non-eligible for surgical treatment. Treatment with albendazole 400 mg/twice daily was started in 2012 for 15 cycles (each cycle consisted of three 28-day treatments at 14-day intervals) over 10 years for a total of 1260 days of treatment. Serum anti-Echinococcus antibody titers and imaging (echography, TC) were evaluated to monitor the evolution of the disease. Imaging techniques documented the regression of all cyst lesions, but it was less evident for the peritoneal localizations that still are in follow-up. In this case, the prolonged treatment with albendazole was effective, safe and free of side effects. Until today, the patient displays a good clinical condition
Contractual Testing
Variants of must testing approach have been successfully applied in Service Oriented Computing for capturing compliance between (contracts exposed by) a client and a service and for characterising safe replacement, namely
the fact that compliance is preserved when a service exposing a ’smaller’ contract is replaced by another one with a ’larger’ contract. Nevertheless, in multi-party
interactions, partners often lack full coordination capabilities. Such a scenario calls for less discriminating notions of testing in which observers are, e.g., the
description of uncoordinated multiparty contexts or contexts that are unable to observe the complete behaviour of the process under test. In this paper we propose an extended notion of must preorder, called contractual preorder, according to which contracts are compared according to their ability to pass only the tests belonging to a given set. We show the generality of our framework by proving that preorders induced by existing notions of compliance in a distributed setting are instances of the contractual preorder when restricting to suitable sets of observers
A measure of tripartite entanglement in bosonic and fermionic systems
We describe an efficient theoretical criterion suitable for the evaluation of
the tripartite entanglement of any mixed three-boson or -fermion state, based
on the notion of the entanglement of particles for bipartite systems of
identical particles. Our approach allows one to quantify the accessible amount
of quantum correlations in the systems without any violation of the local
particle number superselection rule. A generalization of the tripartite
negativity is here applied to some correlated systems including the
continuous-time quantum walks of identical particles (both for bosons and
fermions) and compared with other criteria recently proposed in the literature.
Our results show the dependence of the entanglement dynamics upon the quantum
statistics: the bosonic bunching results into a low amount of quantum
correlations while Fermi-Dirac statistics allows for higher values of the
entanglement.Comment: 19 pages, 3 figure
Dynamics of quantum correlations in colored environments
We address the dynamics of entanglement and quantum discord for two non
interacting qubits initially prepared in a maximally entangled state and then
subjected to a classical colored noise, i.e. coupled with an external
environment characterized by a noise spectrum of the form . More
specifically, we address systems where the Gaussian approximation fails, i.e.
the sole knowledge of the spectrum is not enough to determine the dynamics of
quantum correlations. We thus investigate the dynamics for two different
configurations of the environment: in the first case the noise spectrum is due
to the interaction of each qubit with a single bistable fluctuator with an
undetermined switching rate, whereas in the second case we consider a
collection of classical fluctuators with fixed switching rates. In both cases
we found analytical expressions for the time dependence of entanglement and
quantum discord, which may be also extended to a collection of flcutuators with
random switching rates. The environmental noise is introduced by means of
stochastic time-dependent terms in the Hamiltonian and this allows us to
describe the effects of both separate and common environments. We show that the
non-Gaussian character of the noise may lead to significant effects, e.g.
environments with the same power spectrum, but different configurations, give
raise to opposite behavior for the quantum correlations. In particular,
depending on the characteristics of the environmental noise considered, both
entanglement and discord display either a monotonic decay or the phenomena of
sudden death and revivals. Our results show that the microscopic structure of
environment, besides its noise spectrum, is relevant for the dynamics of
quantum correlations, and may be a valid starting point for the engineering of
non-Gaussian colored environments.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figure
Physical activity and cardiovascular prevention: Is healthy urban living a possible reality or utopia?
Favoring correct lifestyles is the most important measure to contrast cardiovascular diseases and the epidemic of high cardiovascular risk conditions, such as obesity, diabetes, and hypertension. Lifestyle is a broad expression that includes diet, physical exercise, and psychological and socio-economic factors, each of which must be taken into due consideration because of their intertwining influences, which may be a barrier to healthy changes at both the individual and population levels. While physical activity has probably received less attention in the last decades, it is likely the most important among the modifiable risk factors for cardiovascular diseases. Improving the habitual physical activity level is an achievable goal, and even small improvements may have important favorable effects on health. Strategies at the population level have to be urgently taken, and involve not only public health, but also administrators and politicians, starting from a rethinking of our cities
Physical realizations of quantum operations
Quantum operations (QO) describe any state change allowed in quantum
mechanics, such as the evolution of an open system or the state change due to a
measurement. We address the problem of which unitary transformations and which
observables can be used to achieve a QO with generally different input and
output Hilbert spaces. We classify all unitary extensions of a QO, and give
explicit realizations in terms of free-evolution direct-sum dilations and
interacting tensor-product dilations. In terms of Hilbert space dimensionality
the free-evolution dilations minimize the physical resources needed to realize
the QO, and for this case we provide bounds for the dimension of the ancilla
space versus the rank of the QO. The interacting dilations, on the other hand,
correspond to the customary ancilla-system interaction realization, and for
these we derive a majorization relation which selects the allowed unitary
interactions between system and ancilla.Comment: 8 pages, no figures. Accepted for publication on Phys. Rev.
A minimum-disturbing quantum state discriminator
We propose two experimental schemes for quantum state discrimination that
achieve the optimal tradeoff between the probability of correct identification
and the disturbance on the quantum state.Comment: 9 pages, 1 figure, OSID style. Submitted to the special issue of
"Open Systems and Information Dynamics", Proceedings of the "38th Symposium
on Mathematical Physics", Torun, Poland, June 200
Intraoperative measurement of parathyroid hormone: A Copernican revolution in the surgical treatment of hyperparathyroidism
Intraoperative parathyroid hormone (PTH) monitoring in the setting of the operating room represents a valuable example of the rationale use of the laboratory diagnostic in a patient-oriented approach. Rapid intraoperative PTH (ioPTH) assay is a valid tool for an accurate evaluation of the success of parathyroid surgery. The reliability of the user-friendly portable systems as well as the collaboration between operators and surgical staff allow the one-site monitoring of the ioPTH decrements on the course of the surgical management of hyperparathyroidism.The rapid answer provided by an effective decrement of PTH during parathyroidectomy contributes dramatically to the efficacy of parathyroid surgery and the reduction of the number of re-operations. Therefore the dose of ioPTH is a valid and reliable support for the success of the intervention of parathyroidectomy at controlled costs
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