1,823 research outputs found
Five year retrospective study on Syphilis in the Sexual Transmitted Disease (STD) centre of the teaching hospital Umberto I in Rome
Objectives: A retrospective study describing syphilis epidemiological and clinical features in patients referring to an infectious diseases centre in Rome, Italy.
Methods: Between January 2011 and December 2015 demographic, behavioral and clinical data were collected from all adult patients attending the Sexual Transmitted Disease Centre of the Teaching Hospital Umberto I in Rome.
Results: Overall 723 patients, 495 males and 228 females, with syphilis infection diagnosis were included. Average age 39.6 ± 13.6 years (median 38) was higher in men than women (41.1 ± 13.6 vs. 36.3 ± 13.1; p<0.001). Patients were from Italy (486 or 67.2%), EU (90 or 12.4%), rest of Europe (38 or 5.3 %), Americas (46 or 6.4%), Africa (36 or 5.0%) and Asia (27 or 3.7%). One-hundred-twenty-three (17.0%) presented primary syphilis, 43 (5.9%) secondary syphilis, 8 (1.1%) tertiary syphilis, 246 (34.0%) serological syphilis, 80 (11.1%) preceding syphilis, 56 (7.7%) gravidic syphilis and 167 (23.1%) came to the STD to control a preceding syphilis treatment. Fifty-six (24.6%) women were diagnosed with syphilis during their pregnancies. Among Chinese female patients, those pregnant represented 87.5%. There were 100 subjects (13.8%) simultaneously HIV+ and 623 (86.2%) HIV- patients. HIV co-infection affected more frequently men (RR 5.30; CI 2.62 – 10.72; p<0.001). In males HIV co-infection affected more frequently homosexuals (RR 11.72; CI 6.72 – 20.45; p<0.001). Overall HIV co-infection affected more frequently foreign patients, specially from the Americas (26.1%), Africa (25.7%) and Asia (22.2%).
Conclusions: A serious problem of “gravidic syphilis” suggests the need for Public Health preventive action. Also an early diagnosis of both syphilis and HIV infection should be reinforced
Usability analysis of a novel biometric authentication approach for android-based mobile devices
Mobile devices are widely replacing the standard personal computers thanks to their small size and user-friendly use. As a consequence, the amount of information, often confidential, exchanged through these devices is raising. This makes them potential targets of malicious network hackers. The use of simple passwords or PIN are not sufficient to provide a suitable security level for those applications requiring high protection levels on data and services. In this paper a biometric authentication system, as a running Android application, has been developed and implemented on a real mobile device. A system test on real users has been also carried out in order to evaluate the human-machine interaction quality, the recognition accuracy of the proposed technique, and the scheduling latency of the operating system and its degree of acceptance. Several measures, such as system usability, users satisfaction, and tolerable speed for identification, have been carried out in order to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach
An Advanced Technique for User Identification Using Partial Fingerprint
User identification is a very interesting and
complex task. Invasive biometrics is based on traits
uniqueness and immutability over time. In forensic field,
fingerprints have always been considered an essential
element for personal recognition. The traditional issue is
focused on full fingerprint images matching. In this paper an
advanced technique for personal recognition based on
partial fingerprint is proposed. This system is based on
fingerprint local analysis and micro-features, endpoints and
bifurcations, extraction. The proposed approach starts from
minutiae extraction from a partial fingerprint image and
ends with the final matching score between fingerprint pairs.
The computation of likelihood ratios in fingerprint
identification is computed by trying every possible
overlapping of the partial image with complete image. The
first experimental results conducted on the PolyU (Hong
Kong Polytechnic University) free database show an
encouraging performance in terms of identification
accuracy
An Embedded Biometric Sensor for Ubiquitous Authentication
Communication networks and distributed technologies
move people towards the era of ubiquitous computing. An
ubiquitous environment needs many authentication sensors for
users recognition, in order to provide a secure infrastructure for
both user access to resources and services and information
management. Today the security requirements must ensure
secure and trusted user information to protect sensitive data
resource access and they could be used for user traceability inside
the platform. Conventional authentication systems, based on
username and password, are in crisis since they are not able to
guarantee a suitable security level for several applications.
Biometric authentication systems represent a valid alternative to
the conventional authentication systems providing a flexible einfrastructure
towards an integrated solution supporting the
requirement for improved inter-organizational functionality. In
this work the study and the implementation of a fingerprintsbased
embedded biometric system is proposed. Typical strategies
implemented in Identity Management Systems could be useful to
protect biometric information. The proposed sensor can be seen
as a self-contained sensor: it performs the all elaboration steps on
board, a necessary requisite to strengthen security, so that
sensible data are securely managed and stored inside the sensor,
without any data leaking out. The sensor has been prototyped via
an FPGA-based platform achieving fast execution time and a
good final throughput. Resources used, elaboration times of the
sensor are reported. Finally, recognition rates of the proposed
embedded biometric sensor have been evaluated considering
three different databases: the FVC2002 reference database, the
CSAI/Biometrika proprietary database, and the CSAI/Secugen
proprietary database. The best achieved FAR and FRR indexes
are respectively 1.07% and 8.33%, with an elaboration time of
183.32 ms and a working frequency of 22.5 MHz
Design Exploration of AES Accelerators on FPGAs and GPUs, Journal of Telecommunications and Information Technology, 2017, nr 1
The embedded systems are increasingly becoming a key technological component of all kinds of complex technical systems and an exhaustive analysis of the state of the art of all current performance with respect to architectures, design methodologies, test and applications could be very interesting. The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), based on the well-known algorithm Rijndael, is designed to be easily implemented in hardware and software platforms. General purpose computing on graphics processing unit (GPGPU) is an alternative to recongurable accelerators based on FPGA devices. This paper presents a direct comparison between FPGA and GPU used as accelerators for the AES cipher. The results achieved on both platforms and their analysis has been compared to several others in order to establish which device is best at playing the role of hardware accelerator by each solution showing interesting considerations in terms of throughput, speedup factor, and resource usage. This analysis suggests that, while hardware design on FPGA remains the natural choice for consumer-product design, GPUs are nowadays the preferable choice for PC based accelerators, especially when the processing routines are highly parallelizable
Expression pattern of estroprogestinic receptors in sinonasal inverted papilloma
open13openSerra A; Caltabiano R; Spinato G; Gallina S; Caruso S; Rapisarda V; Di Mauro P; Castro V; Conti A; Licciardello L; Maiolino L; Lanzafame S; Cocuzza SSerra, A; Caltabiano, R; Spinato, G; Gallina, S; Caruso, S; Rapisarda, V; Di Mauro, P; Castro, V; Conti, A; Licciardello, L; Maiolino, L; Lanzafame, S; Cocuzza,
Heritability of human "directed" functional connectome
IntroductionThe functional connectivity patterns in the brain are highly heritable; however, it is unclear how genetic factors influence the directionality of such "information flows." Studying the "directionality" of the brain functional connectivity and assessing how heritability modulates it can improve our understanding of the human connectome. MethodsHere, we investigated the heritability of "directed" functional connections using a state-space formulation of Granger causality (GC), in conjunction with blind deconvolution methods accounting for local variability in the hemodynamic response function. Such GC implementation is ideal to explore the directionality of functional interactions across a large number of networks. Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging data were drawn from the Human Connectome Project (total n = 898 participants). To add robustness to our findings, the dataset was randomly split into a "discovery" and a "replication" sample (each with n = 449 participants). The two cohorts were carefully matched in terms of demographic variables and other confounding factors (e.g., education). The effect of shared environment was also modeled. ResultsThe parieto- and prefronto-cerebellar, parieto-prefrontal, and posterior-cingulate to hippocampus connections showed the highest and most replicable heritability effects with little influence by shared environment. In contrast, shared environmental factors significantly affected the visuo-parietal and sensory-motor directed connectivity. ConclusionWe suggest a robust role of heritability in influencing the directed connectivity of some cortico-subcortical circuits implicated in cognition. Further studies, for example using task-based fMRI and GC, are warranted to confirm the asymmetric effects of genetic factors on the functional connectivity within cognitive networks and their role in supporting executive functions and learning
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